A man named Cole Allen, thirty-one years old, from Torrance, California, charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He had written — and his family had been alarmed enough to send the writing to the police minutes before he acted — that he intended to target Trump administration officials. He got off a few shots before being subdued. One Secret Service officer was struck in the vest and lived because the vest was good. The president and the vice president and the cabinet were rushed out of the ballroom. The shooter was taken into custody alive.

Trump returned to the White House briefing room within the hour. He said, of the long list of figures who have been targeted in attempts on their lives, that they’re the big names, and I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot. He used the moment to advocate for the construction of his new ballroom, which he said in a Truth Social post would never have happened in had it been built already. He has not, at the time of this writing, expressed any concern for the populations his administration has spent the past year designating as enemies of the state. He has not expressed any reflection on the relationship between the rhetoric he has been producing for ten years — vermin, enemy within, the dehumanization of his political opponents as a campaign strategy — and the fact that an American citizen, with apparently sufficient grievance against his administration, walked up to a security checkpoint with three weapons and a manifesto.

There is no concern for the populations because the populations are not real to him in the relevant sense. Their suffering is priced in, to borrow Ben Shapiro’s term from yesterday’s interview. Their fear is priced in. Their dead are priced in. The only fear that registers is his own fear, which he has converted, within sixty minutes of the event, into political capital for a building project.

That was the night.

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On CNN, while the ballroom was still being cleared, Van Jones went on the air and said the following:

“I’m starting to worry about something, though, which is that the shooter survived, which means on Monday he’s going to court, which means there is a danger that people try to make him some sort of hero. You watch what happened with Luigi [Mangione], who shot a CEO to death and somehow became a hero. So, they said tonight you saw the worst of America. You saw the best of America. Tonight, you definitely saw the best of America. I hope on Monday we don’t see the worst again. I just want to say very clearly — this kind of despicable behavior has no place in America.”

I want to be careful here, because I have respect for Van Jones as a person and as a presence in the discourse, and because the substance of what he said is not wrong on its face. Political violence is wrong. Lionizing it is wrong. The hypothetical of someone making Cole Allen into a folk hero is real, given that exactly that did happen with Luigi Mangione, and that the country is in a condition where the basic taboo against celebrating violence against political enemies has been visibly degraded.

But I want to look at the structure of the move Jones made, because the structure is the thing.

The structure is this. A would-be assassin, motivated by what appears to have been grievance against the most authoritarian American administration in living memory, attempts to kill that administration’s officials at a press dinner. The substance of the moment — the actual content of what just happened — is the second assassination attempt within eighteen months on figures associated with the Trump project, in a political climate the Trump project itself has produced through a decade of explicit incitement against its enemies. The frame the moment demands, if the frame is to track reality, is the frame that names the relationship between the climate and the act. The climate was produced by a specific coalition. The act is downstream of the climate. The carriers of the climate include nearly everyone seated in that ballroom on the right side of the aisle, including Trump himself, who has been producing eliminationist rhetoric against his political opponents at industrial scale and would, given the chance, produce more of it before breakfast tomorrow.

Jones did not name this. The frame Jones reached for instead — within minutes, on live television, with the country watching — was the frame in which the most pressing concern was not the climate of incitement that produced the act, but the hypothetical future leftist who might celebrate it. He pre-condemned a celebration that had not happened. He pre-condemned it on behalf of an audience that had not asked for the pre-condemnation but that he, Van Jones, in his role as the liberal-coded panelist on cable news, had been trained to perform the pre-condemnation for. The performance was not addressed to the people who had just been frightened. It was addressed to the people on his right at the panel desk, the conservative-coded figures whose approval the structure of cable news requires the liberal-coded figure to seek by ritually denouncing the worst possible version of his own coalition before any real version of it has shown up.

This is what genuflection looks like in the cable-news register. It looks like a sincere, articulate, well-intentioned man using his airtime, in the immediate aftermath of an attempt on the president’s life, to perform the ritual demanded of his slot.

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I want to talk about condemn as a speech act, because the ritual that Jones performed last night is the ritual that the entire American discursive apparatus has been disciplining liberals into performing for the better part of a decade, and the discipline has worked, and the working of it is one of the load-bearing reasons we are where we are.

Condemn in current American political usage is not a neutral term for expressing disapproval. It is a ritualized performance with specific structural properties. The performance requires the speaker to interrupt whatever else they were saying, deliver a denunciation in a register of theatrical seriousness, and only then resume their actual argument. The denunciation itself does no analytical work. It is a tax paid for permission to continue speaking. The tax is asymmetric — certain speakers are required to pay it before being heard, others are exempt — and the asymmetry tracks political alignment rather than the actual moral weight of the events being denounced.

The asymmetry is documentable across decades. When violence is committed by figures or movements coded right, the demand for ritual condemnation falls on the right with a feather and on the left with a hammer. The right is permitted, after a token of course we don’t condone violence, to immediately pivot to its actual political project — which is often, in fact, the political project that produced the violence. The left is required to spend days performing the ritual, with each performance scrutinized for adequate fervor, before being permitted to speak about anything else. When violence is committed by figures or movements coded left, the demand inverts entirely. Liberals are required to condemn before being heard on any topic. Conservatives are permitted to use the violence as a cudgel against the entire liberal coalition, as evidence that the coalition is morally bankrupt, as a frame within which any subsequent liberal political claim is automatically suspect.

This is the discipline. It has been operating in plain sight since at least 2016 and probably much longer. It has trained an entire generation of liberal commentators to genuflect preemptively, to lead with the condemnation, to perform the ritual before the demand for it has even been uttered, in the hope that performing it preemptively will earn them permission to speak about the actual subject without being interrupted again.

It does not earn them permission. The ritual must be performed every time. The next time the demand will be made again. The genuflection produces no goodwill, because goodwill was never what the ritual was for. The ritual is for the maintenance of an asymmetry. The asymmetry is what the apologist class on the right uses to keep the moral attention of the country pointed at the wrong populations.

Van Jones, last night, was performing the ritual. He performed it preemptively. He performed it before the hypothetical hero-making had occurred. He performed it on behalf of an audience that did not include him in the populations the night’s events were about. He performed it because the cable news panel desk has rules, and the rules require the liberal-coded panelist to lead with the denunciation, and the denunciation is the price of the slot.

He may have believed every word he said. I am not impugning his sincerity. What I am naming is the structural function of his performance, which was not to express a moral commitment Jones genuinely holds — he holds it, I do not doubt it — but to perform that commitment in the specific ritualized form the apparatus has trained him to perform it in, and at the specific moment when the performance is most useful to the very project that produced the violence he was condemning.

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The reactionary nature of the condemn demand is worth being precise about, because reactionary in this usage is not the colloquial right-wing. Reactionary names a structural posture — the demand that political analysis be paused, that the ground of the conversation be reset, that the speaker prove their bona fides through ritual performance before being permitted to continue. The demand is reactionary because it operates by interrupting forward analytical motion in favor of returning the conversation to a baseline where the speaker has to re-establish their fitness to participate.

This is the move that reactionary projects always make. Stop. Recite the catechism. Then we will see whether you can speak again. The catechism varies by era and by movement. The structural shape does not.

In the current American context, the catechism is condemnation of political violence in the abstract, regardless of who committed it, regardless of the conditions that produced it, regardless of the asymmetry of the demand. The recitation of the catechism is treated as a precondition for serious moral engagement. Refusal to recite it is treated as evidence of moral failure. The speaker who notices that the catechism is functioning as a control mechanism rather than as an honest moral demand, and who declines to recite it on the grounds that recitation is what the control mechanism requires, is treated as someone who has admitted the moral failure the catechism was constructed to test for.

This is a trap. The trap was constructed by a specific coalition for a specific purpose. The purpose is the maintenance of an asymmetry in moral attention that allows the coalition to commit violence — at the level of policy, at the level of rhetoric, at the level of stochastic incitement — while keeping the moral spotlight pointed at the populations the coalition has designated as morally suspect.

We should be against violence. We should support laws against it. We should be glad, when the alternative was worse, that no one was killed last night. None of these substantive moral commitments require the performance of the ritual. The substance is one thing. The ritual is another. The ritual has been functioning, for the better part of a decade, as a control mechanism on a specific side of the discourse. We can affirm the substance and refuse the ritual at the same time. The two are not the same operation.

I am not going to give a sermon against political violence in this moment, all things considered. The all-things-considered includes the specific way the demand to condemn has been functioning in our discourse, the specific architecture of the trap it represents, the specific coalition that benefits from the trap’s continued operation, and the specific historical record of which violence gets the ritual demanded of its critics and which violence does not.

What I will do, instead, is name what I think the moment requires.

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What the moment requires is the analytical work the ritual is designed to prevent.

The analytical work begins with the observation that political violence in this country is an output of a political climate, and the political climate is not equally produced by both sides. The current political climate is overwhelmingly the product of the Trump coalition, which has spent ten years producing eliminationist rhetoric at a scale and intensity that has no parallel in modern American political history. The dehumanization of immigrants. The dehumanization of trans people. The naming of political opponents as vermin and enemies within. The repeated, near-daily characterization of journalists as enemies of the people. The encouragement of violence at rallies. The pardoning of January 6 attackers. The reframing of January 6 as a day of love. The Charlie Kirk truly impactful people-style fantasies of his own enemies’ deaths. The Stephen Miller architecture of cruelty as policy. The Vance posture of no boundaries on right-wing alliance. The decade of exactly this material, produced and amplified at industrial scale.

The climate produces acts. Some of the acts are committed by the coalition’s own members against the coalition’s designated enemies. Some of the acts are committed against the coalition’s members by people whose grievances against the coalition have built up to the point where the basic taboo against political violence has, for them, broken. Cole Allen, whatever the particular contents of his manifesto turn out to be, is a person operating in this climate. The climate is not his fault. He is responsible for his own actions. The climate did not pull the trigger. He pulled the trigger. The climate produced the field of grievance and resonance and breakdown in which a person like him could come to believe that what he was about to do was justified.

This is not difficult to say. It does not require the speaker to celebrate Cole Allen, or to lionize him, or to suggest that what he did was good. It requires only the analytical honesty to name the relationship between climate and act when the climate is the one that has been producing the conditions for the act.

The cable news panel does not permit this analysis to be performed. The cable news panel requires that the violence, when it lands, be treated as a freestanding event, disconnected from the climate, susceptible to ritual condemnation in the abstract, available to be deployed by the right against the left and unavailable to be deployed by the left against the right. The panel requires this because the panel is shaped by the same asymmetric demand as the rest of the discourse.

Van Jones works in this format. He has worked in it for years. He has been disciplined by it for years. The discipline produces the kind of segment he produced last night, in which the most urgent moral task in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt against a Trump administration official is the pre-condemnation of a hypothetical leftist celebration that has not yet occurred. The hypothetical celebration exists, in the segment, as the substitute for the analysis the format does not permit. The leftist who has not celebrated yet is the available target. The coalition that produced the climate is the unavailable target.

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What I am asking of the readers of this piece, and of the people who watched Van Jones last night and felt the unease they probably felt, is not to disrespect Van Jones. Van Jones is doing his job under conditions that constrain what he is able to say. The constraint is real. The constraint is what the format produces.

What I am asking is for the readers to notice the constraint. To see the genuflection as genuflection. To recognize that the framework demanding the genuflection is the framework that has been producing the asymmetric moral attention for a decade, and that the asymmetric moral attention is part of how we got to a country where a man can charge a security checkpoint with three weapons and a manifesto and the very first thing the cable news liberal feels obligated to do is pre-condemn the leftists who might celebrate him.

The leftists who might celebrate him are not the load-bearing problem. The coalition that produced the climate in which a Cole Allen could be produced is the load-bearing problem. The cable news format does not permit this distinction to be made cleanly. The format requires that the load-bearing problem be folded into a both-sides equivalence in which the leftists-who-might-celebrate are positioned as the moral peer of the coalition-that-produced-the-climate. They are not the moral peer. The asymmetry is the analysis. The asymmetry is what the genuflection works to obscure.

The substantive moral position is available to anyone willing to hold it. Political violence is wrong. Trying to assassinate the president is wrong. Trying to assassinate cabinet officials is wrong. Lionizing assassins is wrong. The entire substantive moral position can be held without reciting the catechism. The catechism is a separate thing. The recitation of the catechism is what the trap requires. Refusing to recite it is not refusing the substance. It is refusing the trap.

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The country saw the best of America last night, in the actions of the law enforcement officer who took a bullet in the vest and lived because the vest was good, in the actions of Steve Scalise pulling Jared Moskowitz into the secure room because both of them have lived through political violence and one of them was not going to leave the other one to live through it again, in the actions of the journalists who, as Weijia Jiang said, run toward the crisis instead of away from it.

The country also saw, last night and this morning, the operating apparatus of the discourse the country has built for itself. The apparatus produced Van Jones’s segment. It produced Trump’s I’m honored press conference. It produced the condemn this immediately demand that has been propagating through every panel desk and every Twitter feed since the moment the shots were heard. The apparatus is the thing that has to be named.

The carriers Van Jones was preemptively condemning, the leftists who he worried would lionize Cole Allen — they are mostly not real. There will be a few. There always are. They do not constitute a movement. They do not constitute a meaningful fraction of the coalition Van Jones is supposed to be in. The apparatus that requires Jones to pre-condemn them, on cable, in the immediate aftermath of an attempt on the president’s life, is doing the political work the apparatus was constructed to do. The work is the maintenance of the asymmetry. The asymmetry is the climate’s main protection.

I am not condemning anything tonight that has not yet happened. I am condemning the demand that I do so, and I am naming the coalition that benefits from the demand, and I am refusing the trap.

The substance stands. The ritual is the trap. We can have one without the other.

That is what the moment requires.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Ben Shapiro went on ’ podcast this week and gave the most clarifying interview I have read in a year. Not clarifying about Donald Trump, who has been clarified for some time. Clarifying about Ben Shapiro, and about the specific kind of figure that has been keeping the Republican coalition welded together while it converts itself into something its own apologists will not name.

Credit, before I continue, where it is due. Sam Harris asked the questions a serious interlocutor should ask, and asked them sharply. Whatever frustrations the conversation produced, Sam was the one who produced the record. I should also say, because I do not write what I do not believe and I am not going to pretend to a unanimity I do not feel, that I find Sam’s views on Islam to be painfully incoherent and obsessive — a fixation that has flattened, across two decades of his work, into a posture that confuses more than it clarifies. That disagreement is real and I am not setting it aside. I note it and place it next to the credit, because what Sam did in this interview is what I am writing about, and what he gets wrong elsewhere does not change what he got right here. The Republican apologist class, on the evidence of this exchange, is incapable of holding two such judgments about the same person at the same time. The capacity to do so is part of what is at stake.

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Sam asked Shapiro about the reframing of January 6 as a day of love — the pardons, the great patriots designation, the hostages framing, the official White House website now advertising this revisionism to the world. Sam pointed out that Shapiro himself, in 2021, called January 6 “the most horrifying thing I’ve seen in American politics in my lifetime,” “inexcusable,” “unjustifiable,” “awful on every level, disgusting on every level and just terrible.” Sam asked: at what point does this become disqualifying.

Shapiro’s reply, verbatim:

“Again, in what way? We keep coming back to this word disqualifying. And the question is disqualifying in what sense?”

The toilet has to be fixed. That is the metaphor Shapiro reached for, earlier in the same interview, to explain his theory of the presidency. “The president is a plumber. Is he going to fix my toilet or is he not going to fix my toilet?” The man who incited a violent attempt to overturn an American election, who has retroactively legalized the violence and lionized its participants, who has on the official .gov website rewritten the history of an attack on the Capitol of the United States — this man, in Shapiro’s mind, is a plumber. The question is whether the plumber leaves footprints on the floor.

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Begin with what Shapiro concedes in this interview, because it is not nothing. It is, in fact, almost everything.

He concedes Trump’s family corruption “has surprised” him. He concedes the tariff catastrophe. He concedes the loyalists are unqualified. He concedes the reframing of January 6 is “corrosive of American culture.” He concedes Trump’s response to political murders is “truly terrible and I think morally egregious stuff.” He concedes Trump “called for the arrests of governors and mayors and even called for members of Congress to be hung for sedition.” He does not contest Sam’s characterization that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He explicitly affirms it: “I think that it was quite risky what he did between the election and January 6th, as I made clear over and over and over.”

He concedes, in other words, the central claim of every liberal critic of the Trump project for the past decade: that the man at the center of it is a wannabe usurper who would have ended the constitutional order in 2020 if the institutional resistance had been weaker, who continues to test those institutions, and whose personal corruption has reached scales that would have ended the political career of any previous American president before lunch.

And then, having conceded all of this, he explains why he voted for Trump anyway, why he would do it again, and why anyone who finds this position scandalous is engaged in hysteria.

The reasoning is the lunacy:

“The guardrails would largely hold... his worst mistakes would end up being mitigated by the pushback of reality.”

This is the argument. The president of the United States is a man who would, if he could, end the constitutional order. The reason it is acceptable to elect him is that he probably cannot. The institutions are strong enough to contain him. The Madisonian architecture will hold, the Supreme Court will strike things down, the Treasury Secretary lives on Earth, the bad picks will be replaced by the merely bad picks. The wannabe dictator is, in the Shapiro analysis, a manageable risk.

Sam pressed him. What if the guardrails do not hold. What if Trump nationalizes the elections, sends federal agents to seize ballots, declares emergency powers, refuses to leave. At what point does the risk to the constitutional order outweigh the policy gains.

Shapiro’s answer: “I also think that the guardrails are significantly stronger than people give them credit for.” And then, the move that names what he is:

“If you actually believe that electoral politics are worthwhile, then I do think that in the same way that I oppose what President Trump did between November of 2020 and January 6th in suggesting that the election was illegitimate and that he had won and that it was all voter fraud, I oppose that. In the same way, I oppose the sort of broad scale narrative that there is gigantic voter suppression happening because when you do that in evidence-free fashion, what you end up doing is undermining the very possibility of of acceptance of elections in general.”

The man who agrees Trump tried to steal the 2020 election is now arguing that the real threat to American democracy is people who worry Trump might try to steal the next one. The hysteria, in his framework, lies not with the man who attempted to overturn an American election but with the citizens who notice that he attempted it and might attempt it again. The proper civic posture, in Shapiro’s view, is to vote for the wannabe usurper, trust the guardrails, and treat the people warning about the usurper as the dangerous extremists corroding democratic legitimacy.

It is not even fair to call Ben Shapiro an ideologue. That would imply a coherent ideology being defended. What Shapiro is, is a partisan apologist of the most elite kind, whose job is to make the most plausible steelman case for voting his clan, in the language of the liberal intellectual tradition, in order to confuse people into going along with it.

The job is apologetics. Apologetics in the technical sense — the production of articulate defense for a position whose adoption preceded the argument and whose retention does not depend on the argument’s success. The position is the tribal commitment to vote Republican and defend the Republican coalition. The argument is whatever construction is required, in any given week, to make that commitment look like a considered judgment rather than a reflex. The arguments change. The commitment does not. The arguments change because reality changes — the Republican coalition produces new outrages, new figures, new contradictions, and the apologist’s task is to incorporate each new development into a defense of the unchanged commitment. This is what apologetics has always been. It is what the church fathers did. It is what the court philosophers of every regime have done. It is an honorable enough trade when the regime being defended is honorable. It becomes something else when the regime is what the Republican coalition has become.

The specific elite quality of the apologetics is what makes Shapiro distinctive. He has chosen to perform the apologetics in the vocabulary of the liberal intellectual tradition. He cites the right philosophers. He distinguishes the right concepts. He uses the rhetorical structures — the careful definitional move, the on one hand and on the other, the I try not to attribute motive, the appeal to consequences over intentions, the binary-choice framing — that the liberal intellectual tradition uses for its own internal debates. The performance is convincing enough that liberals who encounter it often mistake it for genuine engagement with the tradition, and engage with it on those terms, and lose, because the apologetics is not actually engaging with the tradition. It is borrowing the tradition’s vocabulary to confuse its members into accepting conclusions the tradition would never reach if it were doing its own work.

This is what Sam Harris was doing in this interview, whether or not he fully realized it. He was treating Shapiro as a fellow inhabitant of the liberal intellectual tradition who had reached different conclusions through different reasoning. The model is wrong. Shapiro is not a fellow inhabitant. He is a translator stationed at the border, whose job is to render his clan’s commitments into the local language for export. The exports are the long careful Sam-Harris-podcast appearances, the Daily Wire op-eds in the register of Commentary circa 1985, the polished debate performances at universities, the books with respectable academic-publisher imprints. Each export is calibrated for the specific audience receiving it. Each export uses the audience’s own vocabulary against itself. And each export’s job is to make the tribal commitment look, to that audience, like a position that a serious person might reach if they thought carefully.

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The structure is one-way and worth naming plainly.

You concede every factual claim your interlocutor makes. Yes, Trump is corrupt. Yes, Trump tried to overturn the election. Yes, Trump’s loyalists are unfit. Yes, the reframing of January 6 is awful. Yes, the family enrichment is unprecedented. Yes, the response to political murders is morally egregious. You concede all of it.

You then argue that none of these concessions can justify changing your vote, because what you are voting for is policy. The policy is what matters. The character, the corruption, the constitutional vandalism — all of these are bundled with the policy and you cannot get the policy without the bundle. So you take the bundle. You take the wannabe dictator because you also get the tax cut, the conservative judges, the Israel alignment, the DEI rollback. The plumber fixes the toilet. The footprints on the floor are the cost of doing business.

When the interviewer asks what would constitute disqualifying behavior — the level of corruption, the level of constitutional violation, the level of cultural degradation — you respond that disqualifying is not a meaningful concept, because politics is binary and the alternative is worse. There is no level. There is no threshold. There is only the comparison. As long as Kamala Harris exists, Trump cannot be disqualified. As long as a Democrat exists who would do the wrong things on Israel or DEI or taxes, no Republican can be disqualified.

The implication, which Shapiro does not quite state but which is the only honest reading of his position, is this: there is no Republican who could be disqualified by character or conduct, because the alternative is always a Democrat, and the Democrat is always worse on policy. The category of disqualifying has been emptied. There is nothing a Republican president can do that would cause Ben Shapiro to vote against him, because the only available alternative would be a Democrat, and Shapiro has decided in advance that no Democrat can ever be acceptable.

This is not a political philosophy. This is a one-way ratchet. And the ratchet has a name. It is what authoritarian movements have always required from their apologist class, in every country where they have come to power: a class of articulate people who concede every factual point about the authoritarian, who acknowledge his crimes, who profess discomfort with his methods, and who continue to vote for him anyway because the alternative is the left. The apologists do not have to believe in the project. They only have to provide cover for the people who do, and to refuse, when asked directly, to ever pull the lever the other way.

Shapiro is functioning as exactly such a class, in real time, in front of Sam Harris, with his eyes open, in 2026.

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Sam asks Shapiro about Trump’s response to a recent political murder — the “truly terrible and morally egregious” commentary Trump produced about the death of someone he disliked. Shapiro agrees it is corrosive of American culture. Sam then asks: “why not price that in as one of the consequences of having this person in the Oval Office?”

Shapiro’s answer:

“I mean, that is priced in as one of the consequences. Again, it comes as a bundle.”

It comes as a bundle. The dehumanization of political opponents at the level of the presidency, the rewriting of constitutional history on official government websites, the corruption running into the billions of dollars, the wannabe coup d’état, the dictator-talk about hanging legislators — all of it bundled together with the policy preferences Shapiro likes, and the bundle, in his accounting, comes out positive. The plumber fixes the toilet. The footprints are priced in.

This is the move that makes him a lunatic. Not because the policy preferences are wrong — that is a separate argument. He is a lunatic because he has constructed an accounting framework in which constitutional vandalism is a line item to be weighed against tax policy, in which an attempted coup is comparable to a trade deficit with Ethiopia, in which the mockery of a widow’s forgiveness at her husband’s memorial service is priced in alongside questions of whether the Department of Education should exist. The categories he is putting on the same ledger are not the same kind of category. The framework that treats them as commensurable is the framework of a person who has lost the capacity to recognize what kind of question is in front of him.

A constitutional crisis is not a policy preference. A wannabe dictator is not a tariff schedule. The reframing of January 6 as a day of love is not on the same ledger as the marginal tax rate. To treat them as if they are, to price them in, to bundle them — this is the cognitive operation that produces the German conservative intellectuals who voted for Hitler in 1933 because the alternative was the communists and Hitler had, on balance, the better economic policy. This is the cognitive operation that produced every collaborationist apologist class in the twentieth century. It is the move that has been recognized, after the fact, as the move that destroyed those figures’ moral credibility forever, that has been recognized as a move that should never be made again, and that Ben Shapiro is making, on a podcast, in the spring of 2026, with his eyes wide open.

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Shapiro performs clarity about Tucker. He calls Carlson’s worldview “truly nefarious and terrible and anti-American in the extreme.” He identifies Carlson’s foreign policy as indistinguishable from Hassan Piker’s. He names the grievance party horseshoe. He notes that Carlson believes “America went fundamentally wrong basically with World War II and everything since has been a disaster area.” He notes that Carlson has hosted Nick Fuentes sympathetically. He identifies the Candace Owens conspiracism around Erika Kirk as “evil.” He identifies Megyn Kelly’s cynicism — she does not believe what Tucker and Candace believe but she “thinks that’s where the clicks are.”

Shapiro has the diagnostic vocabulary. He can deploy it. He can produce paragraphs of accurate, specific, well-sourced critique of figures on his ostensible side. He went to TPUSA and gave a speech against it.

He deploys this vocabulary against Tucker, against Candace, against Megyn Kelly. He does not deploy it against Trump. He does not deploy it against Vance. He does not deploy it, in any sustained way, against any figure whose continued goodwill matters to his audience share or his tribal standing. The vocabulary is not a faculty. It is a costume, worn when the wearing is useful and removed when it is not.

The costume includes specific accessories: the citation of source material, the careful parsing of definitions, the rhetorical posture of intellectual humility, the I try not to attribute motive line, the willingness to disagree with allies on narrow points so that the broader allegiance reads as principled. The accessories are real. Shapiro is genuinely well-read. He genuinely can construct an argument. He genuinely does, sometimes, criticize his own side. None of this is affectation.

The affectation is what the costume is being used for. By denouncing Tucker, Shapiro positions himself as the responsible conservative, the one who can be trusted to denounce the bad actors, the one whose subsequent votes for Trump and Vance can therefore be received as considered judgments rather than tribal reflex. The Tucker criticism is the alibi. The vote is the act. Tucker is, in this specific structural sense, the foil against which Shapiro can be the responsible adult — and the responsible-adult posture is what allows Shapiro to keep delivering, week after week, the long careful defense of the political coalition that is producing Tucker, has produced Trump, and will produce whoever comes after Trump.

This is what makes him different from Tucker, and worse. Tucker is what he is. He has stopped pretending. He says what he thinks, or close enough to it, on his show, in front of his audience, and the audience knows what they are getting. Shapiro produces, week after week, the long careful reasoned defense of why a man who believes none of what Tucker believes will continue to vote for the political coalition that has produced and continues to elevate Tucker. Tucker is the symptom. Shapiro is the immune system that has decided not to fight the infection because the infection is on the same team as the host.

He cannot connect any of this to Trump.

The man who has been cultivating, defending, platforming, and pardoning the precise people Shapiro identifies as “truly nefarious and terrible and anti-American” — the man whose vice president stood at TPUSA explicitly defending the inclusion of those same figures — that man is, in Shapiro’s framework, still the plumber. The toilet is still being fixed. The fact that the plumber has spent a decade enabling, funding, organizing, and now consolidating the movement Shapiro is denouncing is priced in. The fact that JD Vance, the heir apparent, has made the political calculation that the future of the Republican Party lies with Tucker and Candace and Fuentes — this is concerning, Shapiro says, but he can already foresee voting for Vance anyway, because the alternative will be a Democrat.

The figures the apologetics denounces are not aberrations of the coalition. They are expressions of it. It is not a faction within the Republican Party. It is not a tendency the responsible adults can wall off. It is the political coalition that elected and is reelecting the man Shapiro voted for, and it is the coalition that will pick Trump’s successor, and it is the coalition Shapiro will vote for again because the Democrat will be worse.

He is denouncing the symptom while writing prescriptions for the disease. The denunciation is part of the prescription. By denouncing the symptom, he authorizes himself, in his own mind and in the minds of his audience, to continue prescribing what produces it. And when asked whether at some point the symptom might force a reconsideration of the prescription, he returns to the binary. Disqualifying in what sense. The toilet still needs to be fixed.

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Shapiro is explaining why he tries not to attribute motive to political actors. “Motivism is a great way to shortcut politics and actually prevent sane conversations because you can always attribute motive to somebody’s political position.” He says this as a virtue. He frames it as intellectual discipline.

In any normal moment of American political history, this would be a defensible posture. We do not know what is in another person’s heart. The respectable conservative tradition has always been suspicious of motivism, for reasons going back to the Christian tradition of refusing to judge the unseen interior of another’s soul. Fine.

But in 2026, applied to Donald Trump, this posture is no longer intellectual humility. It is willful blindness. Trump’s motives are not unseen. They are the most visible motives of any public figure in American history. He has stated them explicitly, repeatedly, in public, on his own platforms, for ten years. He has told us he wants to be a dictator on day one. He has told us he wants to terminate the Constitution. He has told us he wants his political opponents prosecuted, jailed, executed. He has told us his policy on January 6 was a day of love. He has told us he wants to nationalize elections. He has told us he wants the military to deal with the enemy within. There is no interpretive labor required to discern Trump’s motives. He has done the labor for us, and the labor consists of describing his motives to anyone who will listen.

Shapiro’s I try not to attribute motive posture, applied to Trump, requires him to ignore what Trump has explicitly said about himself, in order to maintain the position that Trump’s policy effects can be evaluated separately from Trump’s stated intentions. The motivism Shapiro is refusing is not Sam Harris’s. It is Trump’s. Trump has told us his motives. Shapiro is refusing to credit Trump’s own self-disclosure, in order to preserve the framework in which Trump can be reduced to a policy bundle.

This is not intellectual discipline. This is the construction of a permission structure. The permission structure exists so that Shapiro and the people who think like him do not have to confront, in the privacy of their own conscience, the fact that they have spent a decade enabling a man who has told them, plainly and repeatedly, what he intends to do to the constitutional order they claim to revere.

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Shapiro is not convertible at this point. The structure of his apologetics is too deeply invested in the framework that allows him to vote for Trump and feel reasonable about it. He has been performing this work for a decade. He will perform it for the next one. The next Republican president, whoever it is, will receive the same treatment from him: a long catalog of concerns, a bundle analysis, a binary framing, and the vote.

What we have been told, by one of the most articulate apologists the Republican coalition has produced, on a podcast with three million listeners, is this.

We have been told that this class agrees with the liberal critics of Trump on every factual claim about Trump’s character, conduct, and intentions. We have been told that they will vote for him anyway. We have been told that the framework they have constructed to make this defensible treats constitutional vandalism as a line item commensurable with tariff schedules. We have been told that they will continue voting Republican regardless of who the Republican is or what the Republican does, because the Democrat will always be worse on the policies they care about. We have been told that anyone who treats the wannabe-dictatorship as a serious threat is engaged in “hysteria” and is themselves “undermining the very possibility of acceptance of elections.”

This is the position. It has now been stated, in plain English, by Ben Shapiro, on the record, with Sam Harris listening.

The position is that the institutional architecture of the United States can be trusted to contain a wannabe usurper, that the people who are not sure it can be trusted are the real threat to the institutional architecture, and that the proper civic response to a man who tried to overturn an American election is to vote for him again so long as the alternative is a Democrat.

The position is lunacy, and one must understand, in the case of Mr. Shapiro, that the lunacy is also very much the point. It is not a matter of his believing what he says. It is a matter of his believing that it must be said, regardless of truth, in order to convince people, in the language of liberal discourse, why they should vote for illiberalism.

The reason it matters that we name it, plainly and on the record, is that this is the thinking that will deliver the next election to the next strongman the Republican Party nominates. JD Vance, if he runs, will inherit Shapiro’s vote on the same logic that delivered Trump’s. So will whoever comes after Vance. The framework has been emptied of any threshold at which Republican conduct becomes disqualifying. The bundle analysis has eaten the political philosophy that was supposed to be doing the bundling.

This is what conservatism has become in the year 2026. Not Burke, not Buckley, not even Kristol. A binary calculation, performed by articulate apologists on podcasts, that yields vote Republican under all conditions for the rest of the foreseeable future.

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The carriers Shapiro mocks — the people refusing to price in a constitutional crisis as a line item against the marginal tax rate — are the people who still understand what kind of question is being asked. They are the ones who can see that the framework Shapiro is operating in is not a framework. It is a permission structure. It is the cognitive apparatus a coalition adopts when it has decided, beneath the level of explicit argument, that there is nothing the strongman can do that would cause it to vote for the other side.

That decision has been made. Shapiro has just told us so. The plumber will be voted for again. The toilet will be fixed. The footprints on the floor — the constitutional ones, the cultural ones, the moral ones, the dead — will be priced in.

The Republican apologist class will go on producing the long, articulate, disqualifying-in-what-sense replies that history will read with the same grim clarity it reads the German conservative intellectuals of 1933.

The costume is well-made. The accessories are convincing. The vocabulary is real, the citations are real, the rhetorical posture of intellectual humility is performed with the practiced ease of a man who has been performing it for fifteen years. None of that changes what is underneath. A tribal commitment that has eaten the philosophy it was supposed to be in service of. An apologetic apparatus trained to produce permission structures rather than judgments. A man who agreed, on a podcast, with three million people listening, that the president of the United States is a wannabe dictator, and who will vote for the wannabe dictator’s chosen successor in 2028 because the alternative will be a Democrat.

Shapiro is an intellectual imposter of the grandest sense. What a waste of mind and life.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Look, I don’t care how this comes off to everybody. But, at this point, it’s what I believe and I’m just going to write it down. That growing sense of disorientation about the world that you feel, I want you to understand something. It’s real. Something is very broken. Not just tiny broken. Not this is just “all politicians are the same and everyone is corrupt” and all the nonsense people say to themselves to avoid facing the reality of the matter that our entire way of life has been compromised. Our world is facing crisis. There are people, even now, who think that the final dispensation of this political moment will be calculated in terms of how “centrist” or “moderate” the candidate is. I know people who think like this. They are delusional. Completely delusional. There is no center.

A center would imply that there is a stable polity of two political factions living together inside a container of broad agreement about the basics, and finding some middle-ground on the specifics. If you think, like the seriously cognitively compromised Senator, John Fetterman does, that there is some meeting-point between two well-behaved factions who can horse-trade on the specifics, then I must inform you that you are living in complete and utter delusion.

I don’t say this to insult you. It’s just a fact, you see. Because outside your bubble, things are getting very serious.

Everybody understands that a very mentally ill man is the most powerful man in the world. The fact that everybody’s mental programming, somehow, someway tells them when they read that, what they are reading is a partisan viewpoint, that say, someone like me would have said no matter what, out of some tribal apologia, I want you to know that you are delusional. Completely. Utterly.

Hear me. Your entire world is about to come crumbling down, and ours along with it. You are at a disadvantage, you see, because you believe in your mind that what everyone wants is to “get back to normal.” To go back to the old way. But here’s the thing: there’s no going back. Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. He cannot be put back together again.

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There is a new politics coming and the shape it takes is not going to be decided by the people in power right now.

The people in power right now have no moral authority. They will not be able to stop what’s coming. We are on the precipice of seeing political upheaval across the world unlike anything anyone has ever lived through. The authoritarians of the world are not sitting pretty. I’d be terrified if I were them.

I think Ukraine is going to win the war.

Hungary was a signal. The fascist formation in America will fall too. There is reckoning upon us.

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There’s a lot of people who have been hurt, are being hurt, and are going to be hurt by what’s coming. This is a time to be kind to the people around you.

Remember you are not a party-affiliation.

Help people who need help. Show kindness. Be the ballast that keeps the ship afloat, even as it takes on water. This is the moment of impact. This is the moment where the consequences are felt. Where the recognition arrives. We have arrived at catastrophe.

Build something better, and remember who lied to you and who told you the truth.

Go Deeper into the Circus

A Virginia state trial judge named Jack Hurley Jr., sitting in Tazewell County Circuit Court — a deep-red Southwest Virginia jurisdiction more than two hundred miles from Richmond — ruled yesterday that the constitutional amendment 2.3 million Virginians had just approved is void from the start. He ordered the Commonwealth of Virginia not to certify the results of Tuesday’s referendum. He declared the entire process unconstitutional.

This is the third time Hurley has ruled against this amendment. The Virginia Supreme Court has reversed him the previous two times, unanimously, in a court described by Cardinal News as small-c conservative — historically cautious, procedurally careful, not in the business of partisan intervention. Hurley ran for the Virginia House of Delegates as a Republican in 1999. The Republican National Committee has court-shopped this case into his courtroom three separate times, past a Virginia statute the Democratic-controlled legislature passed specifically to require cases like this to be filed in Richmond. Hurley, each time, has agreed that Tazewell is a proper venue. Each time, he has ruled for the RNC. Each time, the Virginia Supreme Court has told him he was wrong.

So he has done it again. He will probably lose again. Attorney General Jay Jones has already announced the appeal.

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The ruling is a produced object. Not the output of a judge wrestling with a hard constitutional question. The output of a legal apparatus that has figured out how to manufacture judicial rulings on demand. Friendly judges. Court-shopped venues. Full awareness that the ruling will be reversed on appeal, because the ruling’s value is not legal.

The ruling’s value is narrative. It is for the Fox News segments running today and tomorrow. For the Trump Truth Social post claiming vindication. For the conservative commentariat’s week of work constructing principled-sounding defenses of the ballot-language complaint. For the fundraising emails going out this afternoon. For the candidates in the redrawn Virginia congressional districts who now have to spend the next six months under a legal cloud. For the post-November litigation strategy in the event that these four Democratic pickups prove decisive — at which point the existence of the Hurley ruling will be cited by Republican challengers claiming the maps were always unconstitutional, even after the Virginia Supreme Court says they were not.

The ruling is an input to a political machine. The legal reversal does not remove it from circulation. The political work it does happens upstream of the appeal.

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Last December, the United States Supreme Court, in one of its many shadow docket drive-by rulings, reversed a three-judge panel led by a Trump-appointed federal district judge named Jeffrey Brown.

Brown had run a nine-day evidentiary hearing and written a 160-page opinion finding Texas’s 2025 map a likely racial gerrymander — a finding three justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson) thought was supported by substantial evidence. Alito, writing for the six Republican appointees, waved it away. Texas’s motivation, he held, was pure and simple partisan advantage, and Rucho v. Common Cause had rendered that unreviewable. Map blessed. Five Republican seats into the 2026 count.

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It said: partisan gerrymanders are unreviewable. It said: the shadow docket is available for emergency stays of rulings that inconvenience Republican outcomes. It said: a Trump-appointed federal judge conducting a nine-day hearing and writing a 160-page opinion is not a sufficient check on the conservative legal apparatus when the apparatus needs a specific outcome. It said: the Purcell principle will be invoked when it advantages Republican maps, even when the 2026 primary is four months away and the general election is a full year away. It said: stated principles are deployable in whatever direction the outcome requires.

That is the license under which Hurley is operating. He did not invent this mechanism. He is using a template. The template has been endorsed at the highest level of the federal judiciary.

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Texas, August 2025: the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a mid-decade gerrymander at President Trump’s direct personal request. No voter ratification. No referendum. No ballot language. Pure legislative fiat, acknowledged by Texas itself as pure and simple partisan advantage. A federal court found racial gerrymandering. The Supreme Court reversed and let it stand.

Virginia, April 2026: the Democratic-controlled state legislature passed, in two successive sessions as Virginia’s constitution requires, an amendment permitting mid-decade redistricting only in response to other states’ mid-decade redistricting. The amendment was ratified by statewide popular vote. More procedural legitimacy than Texas, not less. A Republican-aligned state trial judge in a remote county, court-shopped past a venue statute, declared it void.

Both of these cannot be correctly decided under any coherent theory of constitutional law. The only thing that makes both positions defensible simultaneously is a prior commitment to Republican outcomes, with jurisprudential vocabulary generated afterwards to cover whichever procedural posture that commitment requires.

The conservative commentariat will spend this week explaining to us why the two rulings are in fact consistent, via some technical distinction about ballot language or state constitutional procedure. Do not engage with the technical distinction. The technical distinction is downstream of the commitment. Next week the distinction will be different, because the outcome will be different, and the principle will be reshaped again to fit.

This is not a jurisprudential tradition. It is a faction.

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Jay Jones appeals. The Virginia Supreme Court hears it. Given its two previous unanimous reversals of Hurley, a third reversal is probable. The court has already made its view on these rulings clear, and nothing in the legal substance has changed. Issuing an injunction to keep Virginians from the polls is not the proper way to make this decision was their holding in March. They will say something similar now about voiding the poll after the polls have closed.

That is the institutional good news. The Virginia Supreme Court is holding. Brown’s 160-page opinion in Texas was holding before the federal Supreme Court reversed him. Some institutions are doing their jobs.

The institutions that are not doing their jobs are the ones that were supposed to constrain exactly this kind of operation. The federal judiciary has been captured at the top. The professional norms of the legal academy have dissolved. The conservative legal movement’s claimed jurisprudential commitments have revealed themselves as deployable rhetoric. A judge like Hurley who produces three rulings, loses all three on appeal, and faces no professional consequence is not a bug in the system. He is the system’s intended use, from the perspective of the faction that has figured out how to use it.

They do not need to win the cases. They need to keep producing the rulings. Every reversal generates a fresh news cycle. Every new ruling produces the appearance of a principled legal fight. The cost of operating is low. The returns are cumulative. The system was built for this.

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Texas was the entire game given away by people who do not want you to notice, and think you are stupid enough to not notice. Missouri followed. North Carolina followed. Ohio followed. California responded. The Virginia referendum on Tuesday — 2.3 million voters, four likely Democratic pickups — was the first response large enough to flip the arithmetic outright. The national Republican coalition cannot absorb the loss of those four seats if the House margin is as narrow as the forecasts suggest. The arithmetic is existential.

So Tazewell County manufactured the answer. A judge already reversed twice, on a third meritless ruling, produces the impression of illegitimacy, runs the clock, feeds the conservative press cycle, and lays the groundwork for the post-November litigation that will try to invalidate specific Democratic House victories on the theory that the underlying map was always unconstitutional. The Virginia Supreme Court will reject the ruling. The rejection will come weeks from now, after the work it was produced to do is already done.

Florida is next week. The Republican legislature convenes April 28 for a special session to draw new maps. Whatever comes out of it will be challenged. Whoever challenges it will be told by the National Review editorial page that the challenge is illegitimate partisan interference with state legislative prerogative — the exact opposite of what that same page will say this week about Virginia. The inconsistency will not be discussed. The inconsistency is the point.

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The thing that makes this moment different from previous moments of judicial bad faith is that they have stopped trying to hide what they are doing.

The conservative commentariat used to construct plausible cover. The rulings used to have at least the surface appearance of jurisprudential reasoning. You had to work a bit, as a reader, to see the pattern underneath. That is no longer true. Hurley’s rulings are increasingly naked. The Supreme Court’s shadow-docket reversal of a Trump appointee on an unsigned emergency order is naked. The commentariat’s week of work this week will be naked. The pattern is visible to anyone who looks for ten minutes.

They no longer need to hide. They have calculated that visibility carries no cost. They have calculated that the American press is too committed to its process-story framing to name what it is seeing. They have calculated that the Democratic coalition is too cautious to respond at the scale the operation requires. They have calculated that the institutions designed to constrain factional capture of the judiciary have been sufficiently eroded that operating openly is now the optimal move.

That calculation is the thing that has to be falsified. Not argued against. Falsified — by making the cost of operating openly visibly, immediately, structurally rise.

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The game has been revealed. The game has been named. The work now is to adjust — rhetorically, institutionally, constitutionally — so that the next metastasis is harder, and the one after that harder still.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The reactionaries got what they wanted. This is worth stating plainly, because a certain kind of liberal commentary keeps treating the current moment as a disaster that has befallen the country — a catastrophe that surprised everyone including its authors. It is not that. It is the successful execution of a political program whose authors told us, for years, in plain language, exactly what they were going to do. They have done it. The dismantling of the administrative state is what they wanted. The capture of the judiciary is what they wanted. The war with Iran is what they wanted. The ICE camps and the deportations are what they wanted. The assault on universities and the neutering of the adversarial press is what they wanted. The concentration of executive power beyond any constitutional check is what they wanted. The consolidation of tech-billionaire authority inside the machinery of the state is what they wanted. The attacks on trans people and on reproductive rights and on every marginalized population the productive system designated as surplus — all of this is what they wanted. They got it. The project has been, on its own terms, a success.

What the project reveals, now that it is visible at full scale, is what the project always was. It is not a positive vision of human flourishing that happens to require some losses along the way. It is a vision whose content is the losses. They want a smaller country. Fewer people in it. Fewer institutions mediating between power and the population. Fewer rights inconvenient to capital. Fewer norms constraining what the powerful can do to the weak. Fewer cultures complicating the monoculture they imagine as natural. Fewer voices in the press. Fewer judges who might rule against them. Fewer professors teaching things that embarrass them. Fewer immigrants reminding them that the American experiment has always been plural. The losses are the point. Once you see this, the current moment stops being confusing. The administration is not failing to produce prosperity. It is producing the losses, which is what its base wanted, and the pain — falling on the people being removed — is not a bug but the feature they came for.

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The people who authored this project, the people who fund it, the people who staff it, and the people who cheer for it are who they have always been. The current moment is not a change in their character. It is a disclosure of their character. For years they operated under constraints that forced them into a public register compatible with the constitutional order — gesturing at democratic norms they did not believe in, mouthing the vocabulary of pluralism they privately held in contempt, framing their projects as reforms within the existing system rather than as attacks on the system itself. Those constraints are gone. The public register has caught up with the private disposition. What you see now is what they always were. The mask is no longer necessary.

Look at what they say, out loud, in public, to their own audiences. The technology executive who fantasizes on investor calls about killing his competitors and drone-striking rivals. The venture capitalist who writes that democracy and freedom are incompatible. The political operatives who speak of their opponents as vermin, as parasites, as enemies within. The immigration enforcers who celebrate the suffering of families torn apart as a feature of a correctly functioning policy. The senators who joke about their colleagues being executed, and the journalists who laugh along. The influencers who promote the eliminationist rhetoric of regimes the previous generation of conservatives would have refused to name in polite company. The billionaires who speak of taxpayers as hosts and themselves as the productive class being farmed, and who have begun to act on the implications of that framing. None of this is an accident of rhetoric. It is what they have always believed, now said out loud, because nothing stops them from saying it out loud, because they have won and they know they have won and they no longer need the mask.

They want to subdue the people their project is harming. If subduing is not enough, they are comfortable with killing. This is not a metaphor and it is not a rhetorical excess. It is the observable disposition of the project toward the populations it has designated as obstacles. The ICE detention deaths are not administrative errors. The Palestinian civilians dying under American munitions are not regrettable collateral. The trans kids driven to suicide by the legal and cultural apparatus constructed against them are not unintended consequences. The women dying from denied reproductive care are not tragic anomalies. These are the project’s outputs, produced by design, defended by their authors, celebrated by the base that elected them. The disposition toward the harmed is not sympathy constrained by difficult tradeoffs. It is contempt for the harmed, delivered as the thing the project was built to deliver. If you cannot see this, you are not paying attention.

There is a story in the Christian tradition about the serpent and the fruit. The serpent tells Eve the fruit will not kill her but will open her eyes. It is the archetypal devil’s offer — the promise that the forbidden thing is not actually dangerous, that the people warning you are the real deceivers, that the fire will not burn if you just put your finger in it. The point of the story is that the devil lies. The fire burns. The burning was the point of the offer.

A lot of people put their finger in the fire over the last decade. Not because they were sinners and not because they were fools. Because they were running an honest empirical test. The test was: are the liberal critics of the reactionary project reading the situation correctly, or are they hysterical partisans inflating threats to keep their own coalition together? The way to answer this question is to take the reactionaries’ claims seriously, see what happens when their program is implemented, and update on the evidence. That is the method of a serious person. It is what intellectually honest people do when they are uncertain.

The test has been run. The evidence is in. The reactionaries were not telling the truth about what they were going to do. Or rather, they were telling the part of the truth about dismantling the existing order while concealing the part about what they were going to replace it with. What they were going to replace it with is the project we are now living inside. The project is not producing prosperity. It is not producing order. It is not producing a restored community of shared values and revived civic virtue. It is producing the losses I named earlier — concentrated, by design, on the populations the project has designated as the legitimate targets of loss. It is producing the concentration of power in a few hands, which the American constitutional tradition was built to prevent. It is producing, in real time, the end of the American experiment as a self-governing republic, and its replacement by something that looks more like the authoritarian regimes the project’s intellectual godfathers have been openly admiring for years.

If you ran the test in good faith and the test has delivered its results, the appropriate response is to update. That is not humiliation. That is what intellectually honest people do. The humiliation is in refusing to update — in clinging to the hypothesis after the evidence has disconfirmed it, because admitting the disconfirmation would require admitting that the people who told you the hypothesis was wrong from the start were right from the start. The admission is hard. The refusal is harder, and it is now costing the country more than the admission would cost you.

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Those of us who were paying attention were not suffering from any kind of delusion. We were not trapped in partisan hysteria. We were not failing to see the legitimate concerns the reactionaries raised about genuine problems in American life. We saw those concerns. We took them seriously. We disagreed with the prescription — not because we were committed to the status quo, but because we could read what the reactionaries actually said and extrapolate what they actually intended to do. The extrapolation was not complicated. It required taking them at their word. Most of the mainstream commentary refused to do this because taking them at their word sounded alarmist, and alarm was coded as a failure of professional composure.

That is the failure that now has to be named. The centrist and mainstream commentary did not fail to see the evidence. It failed to extrapolate from the evidence, because extrapolating correctly would have required a register of alarm the professional culture prohibited. The people willing to extrapolate — the writers and scholars and activists who said in 2016 and 2020 and 2022 and 2024 that the reactionary project intended exactly what it is now doing — were treated as unserious for saying so. The norm of professional composure punished accurate prediction. It rewarded the measured tone that refused to name what was coming, because the measured tone was what the commercial model of the centrist press required. That model is now producing a press incapable of describing the regime it is living under, and the descriptive capacity has migrated to the places — the newsletters, the independent platforms, the scholarly monographs, the specific outlets that preserved a register of alarm — where accurate prediction was possible because the professional penalty for it was absorbed by the writer rather than filtered out by the institution.

The vindication is not personal. I am not asking you to acknowledge that I was right, or that any specific writer was right. The liberal tradition, read carefully, contains the conceptual resources for understanding what reactionary movements are, what they do when they come to power, and why the specific institutions of constitutional republicanism exist to constrain them. The tradition predicted the current moment because the tradition was built in response to earlier versions of the current moment. The people who read the tradition correctly were able to predict accurately. The people who dismissed the tradition as outdated — who thought the end-of-history thesis of the 1990s meant the older liberal warnings about concentrated power and reactionary movements were no longer relevant — were the ones who failed to predict. The failure of prediction indexed the abandonment of the tradition, not the tradition’s inadequacy.

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The reason it matters what you do with the evidence is that restoring the republic requires the people who were curious to join the people who were paying attention. The reactionary coalition is not the majority. It is a coalition of minorities — a faction of the wealthy, a faction of the aggrieved, a faction of the ideologues, a faction of the opportunists — held together by the shared project of subtraction and by control of the levers of power. It has been numerically defeated in most of the recent elections it has contested. What it has instead of numbers is an organized faction working in concert with an asymmetric constitutional architecture that magnifies minority power, a media environment that has systematically misdescribed the stakes, and a set of billionaires willing to spend unprecedented sums to tilt the playing field. The project is powerful but not popular. It can be defeated.

Defeating it requires a coalition that includes the people who were curious. The hardcore reactionaries are not persuadable. Their commitment is an expression of who they are, not a mistake to be corrected, and the only politics available with respect to them is containment and democratic defeat. The curious are different. The curious were running the empirical test, and the test has delivered its results. The liberal project — the positive case for pluralistic self-government, for the rule of law, for the institutions that constrain concentrated power, for the civic conditions under which human beings can flourish in their full diversity — is the project that was right about the reactionaries and is also the project capable of replacing what the reactionaries have broken. The curious, having run the test, are welcome in the coalition that was right. You do not need to confess to having been stupid. You only need to acknowledge that the test has been run and that the results favor the side that was paying attention.

The welcome is sincere, and it is not triumphant. The people who were paying attention are not looking for the satisfaction of having been proved right. They are looking for help in the specific work of restoring what is being destroyed. The work is not small. The constitutional damage is real. The institutional damage is real. The human damage, to the people the project designated for loss, is real and in many cases will not be undone in the lifetimes of the people who survived it. The rebuilding will take a generation. It requires as many hands as can be mustered. The hands of the curious, now that the curiosity has been resolved, are welcome.

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There is a line in the Whitman poem I invoked in a comment on Matt Zwolinski’s essay yesterday, in a different context, that speaks to what I am trying to say here. The poem — O Me! O Life! — asks what good anything is given the vanity and emptiness and suffering of existence, and answers its own question in the final lines: That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. The play is the collective project of human flourishing. The verse is whatever the individual life adds to it. The question of whether the contribution matters is settled not by the grandeur of the contribution but by the fact of contributing at all. The play goes on because people contribute to it. It stops when they stop.

The reactionary project is a project of stopping the play. It wants the play smaller, less plural, closed off to contribution from the populations it has designated as unworthy. The liberal project is the project of keeping the play going. Its content is the preservation of the conditions under which contribution remains possible — for everyone, across the full diversity of human formations, through the plural institutions that protect the space in which contributions can be made. This is not a procedural commitment. It is a metaphysical one. It holds that the play is what existence is for, and that the removal of contributors is a loss to the whole.

The curious who are now updating their understanding are, I hope, coming to see that the liberal project was the right project because the liberal project is the project of the play going on. The reactionary alternative was never a competing vision of the good. It was the project of ending the play, or of continuing it only for a narrower cast, with the rest of us struck from the program. This is not a policy disagreement. It is a disagreement about whether the play is worth keeping.

I believe the play is worth keeping. The evidence of the last several years has confirmed, for anyone willing to look at the evidence, that the people who said the play was worth keeping were right, and that the people who said the play could be improved by subtraction were lying — to themselves, to their followers, to the country that gave them the chance to prove their thesis and is now suffering the consequences.

We were paying attention. It was not delusion. It was reading the situation accurately while most of the commentary refused to read accurately, because reading accurately required an alarm the commentary’s professional culture would not permit. The alarm was warranted. The evidence has confirmed it. The work now, for everyone who has eyes to see, is to join the project that was right — not in triumph, not in contempt for those who tested the claim and have now been disabused, but in the specific civic labor of restoring what can be restored and preserving what still can be preserved, so that the play goes on, for everyone, through the longest night of our republic that any of us has lived to see.

The play goes on. Contribute your verse.

Go Deeper into the Circus

People have been trying, for years, to reconcile two observations about Elon Musk that seem difficult to hold simultaneously. The first is that he is one of the most consequential industrial operators of the twenty-first century, responsible for two companies — Tesla and SpaceX — that have genuinely changed the trajectory of their respective industries in ways that were not obviously going to happen without him. The second is that his public political and cultural commentary is, on nearly any subject outside his areas of technical expertise, somewhere between embarrassingly shallow and actively dangerous. How does the same mind produce reusable orbital rockets and the posts he writes on X at three in the morning? The standard explanations have been psychological. He is a damaged narcissist. He is isolated by wealth. He is on ketamine. He is on too much Twitter. He has always been like this and we just see it now because the platform is his. These explanations are not wrong, exactly, but they all treat the contradiction as a puzzle to be dissolved by adding biographical facts until the two Musks become compatible. They miss the structural point, which is that there is only one Musk, and the specific mind that built Tesla and SpaceX is the same specific mind that is at this moment helping to dismantle the American administrative state. The engineering genius and the political pathology are not two separate features of the person. They are the same cognitive apparatus applied to two different domains, and the apparatus is excellent for one domain and catastrophic for the other.

I want to describe, as precisely as I can, how Musk thinks. I want to do it at length, because the description does work that shorter critiques cannot do. It explains what his actual contribution to manufacturing has been, which is significant and worth naming. It explains why that same contribution, generalized into politics, produces authoritarianism rather than good governance. And it places him in a specific American tradition — the tradition of industrial-fascist figures whose manufacturing genius and political depravity are linked by exactly this pattern — that makes the current moment legible as a recurrence rather than a novelty.

Musk thinks about the world as if it is software. This is not a metaphor. This is the operating grammar of his cognition. He takes the conceptual tools that work in software engineering — version control, continuous integration, rapid iteration, refactoring, debugging, A/B testing, optimization against objective functions, hardening against adversarial inputs — and applies them to everything he encounters. Factories are software. Rockets are software. Cars are software. Cities are software. Governments are software. Human beings are software. Political institutions are software. Cultures are software. The software-as-worldview is so total that it is not, to him, a worldview at all. It is what thinking looks like. The possibility that some domains might not be software-shaped is not available to him as a thought, because the tool he thinks with cannot perceive the shapes it cannot handle.

This sounds like a criticism but I want to start with the place where it is a genuine strength, because the essay does not work if you do not understand that the engineering achievement is real.

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The standard way to think about Musk’s industrial accomplishments is to treat them as matters of scale and capital. He had a lot of money, he hired smart engineers, he pushed them hard, he shipped products. This is true but it does not explain what the actual innovation was, because Ford had money, Boeing had money, General Motors had money, Lockheed had money, and none of them produced what Tesla and SpaceX produced. The specific thing Musk did that the legacy industrial firms did not do is treat the factory itself as a version-controlled system under continuous integration, and this is a genuine contribution to manufacturing theory that belongs in the same intellectual tradition as Toyota’s lean production and Ford’s assembly line.

The traditional paradigm, which dominated twentieth-century mass manufacturing and still dominates most of contemporary industry, treats a factory as a system that is designed, optimized, and then maintained at equilibrium. You spend years engineering a product. You spend more years engineering the tooling to produce it. You turn on the line. The line produces the product. Continuous improvement in the Toyota sense means refining the line to produce the same product better — fewer defects, lower costs, faster throughput. The product itself does not substantially change until the next model cycle, which happens on a timescale of three to seven years depending on the industry. The design-manufacturing boundary is rigid. Engineering designs the car. Manufacturing builds the car. The handoff between them is formal and infrequent.

Musk’s insight, which he did not articulate in these terms but which is legible in the structure of his operations, is that this rigidity is a legacy constraint from a prior era of industrial technology, and that modern manufacturing can be run like a software project. A software codebase is not something you design once and then maintain. It is something you ship in a state of continuous improvement. Every day, every hour, developers are committing changes. Each change passes tests. If it passes, it goes into the next deployment. If it fails, it is reverted. The product users receive is materially different from the product users received a week ago, even though it carries the same name. This is possible because software is infinitely malleable and because the infrastructure for managing continuous change — version control, automated testing, deployment pipelines — has been developed to industrial-grade reliability over the last thirty years.

Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX operations apply this logic to physical manufacturing. A Tesla Model S in 2026 shares a nameplate with a Tesla Model S from 2013, but the internals have been iterated through hundreds of silent revisions. The battery chemistry has changed multiple times. The wiring harnesses have been simplified. The drive units have been replaced with entirely different designs. The assembly processes have been automated and then partially un-automated and then re-automated differently. Individual components are swapped out mid-production when a better supplier becomes available or when an internally-designed replacement passes testing. The line is, effectively, a deployment pipeline for a physical artifact. Each car coming off the line is a build of the Model S — a specific version, distinguishable from the version that came off the line last week, embodying whatever improvements have cleared the gate since.

SpaceX runs the same logic with even more visible results. The Falcon 9 rocket that flew in 2015 is a different rocket from the Falcon 9 that flies today, despite carrying the same name. The Merlin engine has been through many versions. The booster structure has been reinforced, lightened, re-reinforced, and optimized for reuse in ways that bear the fingerprints of hundreds of specific engineering decisions made in production rather than during a design cycle. The Starship program goes even further. Each test flight is explicitly a deployment. The rocket blows up, the engineers look at what happened, they revise the code, they build the next version, they fly again. The iterations are measured in months rather than years. This is how software projects work. It is not how aerospace projects have traditionally worked. The legacy aerospace industry designs a rocket, builds it with decades-long tolerances, flies it, and treats any failure as a catastrophe demanding exhaustive investigation before another flight is attempted. SpaceX treats failure as a test signal, uses it as input to the next revision, and ships the next revision quickly. The iteration speed is the advantage. The iteration speed is possible because the factory is organized as a continuous deployment pipeline rather than as a batch-production facility.

This is a real contribution. It is not hype. It is a manufacturing-theory innovation that deserves to be named as such, and the innovation is genuinely the result of applying software-industry organizational patterns to physical production. Toyota optimized the line to produce the same car better. Ford invented the line as an organizational form. Musk invented the continuously-integrated line — the factory as a rolling deployment of an improving artifact — and the innovation explains both Tesla’s cost curve on batteries and SpaceX’s cost curve on orbital launch. Neither curve would have been achieved by the legacy industries operating in their traditional manner. The innovation is his.

This is what his Henry Ford contribution actually is. It is not the electric car. Other companies would have built electric cars eventually. It is not the reusable rocket. The engineering for reusability was worked out incrementally by many people. It is the organizational form — the factory as continuous-deployment system — that scales. This is the thing historians of technology will credit him with a century from now, assuming there are historians of technology a century from now.

So far so good. If Musk had stayed in the domain where his cognitive apparatus is an asset, he would be a genuinely historically significant industrialist and nothing more. He would be remembered alongside Ford and Edison and Jobs as one of the Americans who invented something that changed how the species produces things. The complication is that he did not stay in that domain. He generalized the software worldview outward, first into business strategy more broadly, then into media and communication with the acquisition of X, then into politics with his alliance with Donald Trump and his role in the current administration’s demolition of the American administrative state. At each step of the generalization, the cognitive apparatus that had served him brilliantly in manufacturing met a domain whose fundamental ontology was not software-shaped, and at each step the mismatch produced pathologies that the legacy understanding of Musk — engineering genius, political amateur — cannot explain. The pathologies are predictable from the cognitive apparatus. They are what happens when you take the software worldview seriously as a theory of everything and apply it in domains where its implicit ontology does not hold.

Let me enumerate the specific features of the software worldview that produce specific pathologies when generalized, because the argument is strongest when stated at the level of mechanism.

One. Software treats all problems as optimization problems with specifiable objective functions. If you can define the metric, you can optimize it. This is correct in software engineering. It is, in fact, the central discipline of software engineering — reducing vague human needs to specifiable requirements so that the implementation can optimize against them. Politics is not that. The whole point of liberal democratic politics is that citizens legitimately disagree about which objective function to optimize, and the political system is the procedure through which that disagreement is adjudicated rather than resolved. A software mind looking at politics sees it as engineering with unacceptably vague requirements, and the software mind’s instinct is to clarify the requirements. Which in politics means imposing a single objective function on a citizenry that has not consented to being optimized around it. Musk has been explicit about this. His account of what government should do, when he speaks about it directly, is that government should minimize wasteful spending, maximize efficiency, and free the productive class to do its work. These are engineering objectives. They are presented as obviously correct, the way minimize memory allocation is obviously correct in a well-written program. The possibility that citizens might legitimately disagree about whether efficiency is the right objective function — that some of them might prioritize equality, or solidarity, or the protection of the vulnerable, or the preservation of traditions the market does not value — is not available to him as a serious consideration. Disagreement with his objective function is not, in his cognitive model, a sign of legitimate political pluralism. It is a sign that the disagreeing party has not understood the requirements. The requirements being obvious, the disagreement must be explained by stupidity or malice. Hence the famous contempt.

Two. Software treats users as endpoints of a designed system rather than as agents whose consent constitutes the system’s legitimacy. A good software designer thinks carefully about user experience, user intentions, user needs. But the user is never the source of the system’s authority. The designer is. The user gets to use the system or not, but the system itself is not accountable to the user in any deeper sense than market feedback. A software mind looking at citizenship sees citizens as users of the state, and asks how the state can be optimized for their experience. What it does not see is that citizens are the source of the state’s legitimacy, which makes them ontologically different from users of an app. This is the specific place where the software worldview diverges from democratic theory. Democratic theory says the citizens are not the users of the state; they are the state, and the administrative apparatus derives its authority from them. The software worldview inverts this. It treats the apparatus as primary and the citizens as consumers. The consequence is a specific flavor of technocratic contempt for ordinary political participation — the sense that voters are noisy inputs to a system that would work better if the noise were filtered out, the sense that representative democracy is inefficient because it aggregates the preferences of people who do not understand the objective function. This is Musk’s actual attitude toward democratic processes, visible every time he talks about them. He does not hate democracy out of explicit commitment to autocracy. He fails to see why democracy is necessary at all, because his ontology does not contain the category of things democracy protects.

Three. Software treats legacy systems as technical debt to be refactored or retired. If a component is inefficient, the move is to rewrite it. If a process is slow, the move is to automate it. This is correct engineering discipline. It is catastrophic political philosophy. Constitutional procedures, the separation of powers, the adversarial press, the independent judiciary, tenured civil service, due process, judicial review, administrative rulemaking, the whole elaborate inheritance of constitutional republican government — these all look like technical debt from inside the software worldview. They are slow. They are inefficient. They have redundancies that could be optimized out. A software mind looking at the administrative state sees a badly-written codebase that needs to be refactored. Move fast and break things, which is the motto of the software industry, is fine when you are iterating on a photo-sharing app. The cost of a mistake is that a feature breaks and you roll it back. Move fast and break things applied to government means that when you break something, you have broken a constitutional function whose restoration requires years of political work, if it can be restored at all. The Department of Government Efficiency operation that Musk has been running for the current administration is the software-refactor mentality applied directly to the American state. Functions are being deleted because the person doing the deleting cannot see why they were there. The engineering instinct is to treat any function whose purpose is not immediately obvious as dead code to be removed. In software, dead code is a maintenance liability. In government, the function you cannot see the purpose of is very often a safeguard against a failure mode that has not occurred recently because the safeguard is working. Removing it produces the failure mode the safeguard existed to prevent. By the time the failure mode becomes visible, the damage is irreversible.

Four. Software treats intelligence as computation and assumes that more compute reliably produces better outputs. This generalizes, in the Musk register, to the assumption that concentrated intellectual and economic power in the hands of technically brilliant people will produce better civilizational outcomes than distributed decision-making. If you have a hard problem, you assign the smartest person to it. If the problem is harder, you assign a team of smart people. If it is civilizational in scope, you assign a tech billionaire. The engineer’s meritocracy scales up into the technocrat’s contempt for democratic procedure. If the smart people are smart enough, why are we letting the dumb people vote on things they do not understand? This is the specific place where the software-as-worldview tips into the explicitly anti-democratic posture that characterizes the current tech right, not just Musk but Thiel and Andreessen and the Yarvin-adjacent factions that have become politically consequential over the last decade. The move from intelligence is computation to concentrated intelligence should govern is almost automatic inside the software worldview, because the worldview has no ontological category for legitimacy as distinct from competence. Competence is observable. Legitimacy, in the republican tradition, is a property of consent, of procedure, of the authorization relation between citizens and their government. It is not observable as a metric. From inside the software worldview, it is therefore not real. The only real thing is who is better at producing outcomes, and the people who are better at producing outcomes should have authority, and the ones who complain about this are either incompetent themselves or engaging in what the tech right calls rent-seeking — trying to extract value from the system without contributing to it.

Five. Software is optimized against adversarial inputs. Every well-designed software system assumes that some fraction of its users will be bad actors, and is hardened accordingly. Rate limiting, captchas, authentication, input sanitization, fraud detection — the whole apparatus of modern software engineering includes a substantial subsystem dedicated to identifying and neutralizing inputs that are trying to exploit the system. The software mind, scanning any population, asks: who are the bad actors? Who are the spam bots? Who are the exploiters? Who are the freeloaders using up resources without contributing? In engineering, this is good discipline. In politics, it is the cognitive structure that produces scapegoating, and it is the specific place where the software worldview generalizes into something that is not merely anti-democratic but actively fascist in the historical sense of the word.

The software mind trained to identify system exploiters will, when given political power, identify populations as system exploiters and optimize the system to exclude them. Immigrants become spam — inputs to be filtered out at the border. Welfare recipients become resource drains — consumers of the system who are not producers in it. Political opponents become adversarial inputs to the information system — sources of misinformation to be hardened against. The homeless become uncaptured externalities of a system that should be refactored to not produce them. Each of these populations, in the software-as-worldview, is a problem to be engineered away. The categories the software mind applies to them are not categories of citizenship or human dignity. They are categories of system performance. And the engineering solution to a performance problem is elimination or isolation of the input source.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. This is a specific cognitive pattern that produces specific political consequences. Musk’s public statements on immigration, on welfare, on political opponents, on the press, on the administrative state, on any population or institution he perceives as extracting value from the system without contributing to it, follow this pattern exactly. He does not hate these populations in the way a traditional racist hates them. He processes them as system exploiters, and his political instinct is to engineer them out of the system. The effect on the populations is indistinguishable from traditional fascism. The cognitive route is different. The traditional fascist has a racial or national or religious theory that designates certain populations as enemies. The software-fascist has a system-performance theory that designates certain populations as adversarial inputs. The outputs converge. The populations being designated are, in the current case, nearly identical — immigrants, the poor, the political left, dissenting journalists, marginalized ethnic and sexual minorities — because the coincidence between traditional-fascist enemy categories and software-fascist adversarial-input categories is not coincidence at all. The traditional fascism was itself a kind of prototype of the cognitive pattern the software mind now instantiates in a more technically sophisticated form.

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This is where the Henry Ford parallel becomes exact and not merely illustrative.

Ford was the industrial genius of his era. His contribution to manufacturing was real and foundational. The assembly line as he organized it at Highland Park in 1913 was a genuine revolution in how mass production works, and the cost curve it produced on automobiles — from a luxury good for the rich to a product available to the working class — remade American society and then the world. Ford was also a virulent antisemite whose Dearborn Independent ran a series of articles in the early 1920s collected as The International Jew, which was enthusiastically received in Germany and read approvingly by Adolf Hitler. Hitler kept a portrait of Ford on his wall and cited Ford’s writings as influences. When the Germans awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, he accepted. His political instincts throughout his life included opposition to unions, sympathy for authoritarian government as an efficient alternative to messy democratic process, and a specific conviction that certain populations — Jews, unionists, Bolsheviks — were parasites on the productive industrial class he represented.

For decades, historians treated Ford’s antisemitism as an embarrassing character flaw that had nothing to do with his manufacturing achievements. This is wrong. The cognitive apparatus that optimized the assembly line — ruthless efficiency, system-level thinking, contempt for anything that obstructed the production process, the treatment of workers as inputs to be managed rather than agents with their own political standing — generalized into a politics that saw certain populations as obstructions to the productive system and designated them for removal. Ford’s antisemitism was not a separate character flaw. It was the same cognitive apparatus that built the Model T, applied to a domain where the apparatus is catastrophic. The apparatus has no ontological category for citizen that is not reducible to productive contributor. Populations that did not fit the productive-contributor category were, in Ford’s cognition, obstructing the system. His antisemitism was the specific cultural form this cognitive pattern took in the American industrial context of the 1920s. Different populations in a different era would have been designated by the same pattern.

Musk is the same structural figure in a different technological era. The cognitive apparatus has been updated for the software age — the specific tools are version control rather than assembly-line optimization, the specific metaphors are about code rather than about production — but the underlying pattern is the same. An industrial genius whose genuine contribution to manufacturing is linked, structurally rather than accidentally, to a politics that identifies populations as obstructions to the productive system and designates them for elimination. The specific populations Musk identifies as adversarial inputs are different from Ford’s in some details — the antisemitism is less central, though it surfaces in his engagements with X‘s algorithmic promotion of antisemitic content and in his recent public sympathy for specific antisemitic tropes about replacement and demography — but the pattern is recognizably the same pattern. The American industrial-fascist tradition runs from Ford through the Liberty League of the 1930s, through the anti-union industrialists of the 1940s and 50s, through the Koch operation of the late twentieth century, and now through the tech-billionaire class of the 2020s. Each generation produces its own version of the figure whose manufacturing competence and political depravity are linked by the same underlying cognitive apparatus applied to both domains.

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This analysis has two consequences worth naming, one explanatory and one practical.

The explanatory consequence is that the Musk puzzle dissolves. There is no mystery about how the same person built Tesla and SpaceX while also helping dismantle the American state. He is doing both things with the same tool. The tool is excellent in one domain and catastrophic in the other, and he cannot see the difference between the domains because the tool he thinks with cannot perceive the difference. He is not stupid about politics in the way a person with low general intelligence is stupid. He is operating at high cognitive capacity with a specific tool that is misapplied to the subject matter. The mismatch is not a character flaw. It is a mismatch between a cognitive apparatus and an ontological domain. The apparatus is software-shaped. The domain is not software-shaped. The outputs are what they are.

The practical consequence is that this pattern is not going away when Musk does. He is not the only figure exhibiting it. He is the most visible and currently the most politically consequential, but the entire tech-right coalition that has aligned itself with the reactionary project is made up of people running versions of the same cognitive apparatus. Thiel runs a darker variant that is explicitly aware of its anti-democratic implications. Andreessen runs a more libertarian-cornucopian variant that tries to paper over the authoritarian implications with techno-optimist rhetoric. The younger generation of tech founders and VCs coming up through Y Combinator and the adjacent institutions are being trained in the same apparatus, and they will be politically active for the next forty years. The specific personalities will come and go. The apparatus will persist. The response to it cannot be personal. It has to be structural.

The structural response, I have been trying to say across this essay series, is a public philosophy that is explicitly not software-shaped. A philosophy that holds consciousness and meaning as features of reality rather than as outputs of computation. A philosophy that treats citizens as the source of political legitimacy rather than as users of a system. A philosophy that recognizes the legacy institutions of constitutional republicanism as accumulated wisdom about how free people govern themselves rather than as technical debt to be refactored. A philosophy that grounds its defense of pluralism in a metaphysics that makes pluralism a feature of reality rather than a procedural compromise. This is what my framework calls SIDAM — structurally irreducible dual-aspect monism — and what I have been articulating in The Positive Case for Liberalism and in the Crisis Papers across the last year. The philosophy is a response to exactly the kind of cognitive apparatus Musk represents, because the philosophy insists on the existence of things the apparatus cannot see.

The reason these things matter — the reason the argument is not merely academic — is that the software-as-worldview does not remain abstract. It is currently, at this moment, the operating theory of the dismantling of the United States federal government. The people who ran the DOGE operation, the people advising on the administration’s approach to regulation, to the civil service, to the press, to the immigration system, to the welfare state, are people whose cognitive apparatus is the one I have been describing. They are not acting maliciously in the sense of consciously seeking to destroy the republic. They are acting in accordance with their genuine theory of what governance is. Their theory is that governance is software engineering applied to national administration, and that applying software engineering discipline to this domain will produce better outcomes. Their theory is wrong. The outcomes it is producing are the predictable consequences of applying a tool to a domain the tool cannot handle. The damage is real, and the damage is being done by people who believe they are fixing something.

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I want to close by naming something that should not need saying but that I think does.

None of this is an argument against software, or against engineering, or against the specific competences Musk and his class have genuinely developed. Software is an extraordinary achievement of human civilization. The cognitive apparatus that produces it is one of the most powerful tools our species has ever developed. The problem is not the tool. The problem is the failure to recognize that the tool has a domain of application, and that domains outside that application require different tools, and that the failure to notice this is producing an industrial-fascist politics that has historical precedents whose outcomes were catastrophic.

The appropriate relationship between software and politics is that software is one of the things the republic contains, not the other way around. The republic is the container. It is older than software. It was built by people who did not think about the world as software, and who understood things about collective self-governance that the software worldview cannot see. A software mind operating inside a republic should have humility about the republic, should treat its institutions as load-bearing until proven otherwise, should respect the accumulated wisdom encoded in the constitutional structure, should understand that efficiency is not the only legitimate objective function a polity can pursue, and should recognize that the citizens who disagree with the software mind’s preferred outcomes are not adversarial inputs but co-sovereigns whose consent is the source of any legitimate authority the software mind exercises.

None of this is how Musk operates. None of this is how the tech-right coalition he leads operates. They are running their cognitive apparatus at full capacity in a domain the apparatus is catastrophically mismatched to, and they are doing it with a degree of concentrated economic and political power that no previous generation of industrial-fascist figures ever wielded.

This is how Elon Musk thinks. It is why he built Tesla and SpaceX. It is why he is, right now, helping to destroy the American republic. The engineering genius and the political pathology are the same cognitive apparatus. The apparatus is excellent in its domain. It is killing us outside of it.

Go Deeper into the Circus

On April 20, 2026, on his own podcast, sitting across from his brother Buckley, Tucker Carlson said this: “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say.”

Yes, you were misleading people, Mr. Carlson. And contra your characterization, it was very much intentional. We have the receipts of the intentionality that you deny. I will now go through those receipts because I think the record deserves a full accounting of your lies. Because, it turns out, you are lying even now.

The word misleading is doing the entire work, and the word is a lie. Tucker Carlson did not mislead his audience. He lied to them. He lied to them knowing the things he was saying were false, said so explicitly in writing at the time he was saying them publicly, and continued saying them anyway because the alternative — telling the truth — threatened his business and his employer’s stock price. The record of this is not contested. It was produced, under oath, through discovery, in a defamation case his employer settled for $787.5 million rather than allow to reach trial. Every significant claim in what follows is drawn from text messages and emails that Tucker Carlson himself wrote, that Fox News was compelled to turn over, and that are now part of the public record of the United States.

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Exhibit one. On November 5, 2020, two days after the election, while Fox News was beginning to report on Trump’s early attempts to contest the results, you texted your producer Alex Pfeiffer about Trump: “We worked really hard to build what we have. Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.” You added: “What [Trump’s] good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

Exhibit two. On November 8, 2020, Pfeiffer texted you that there was no evidence of voter fraud that swung the election. You replied: “The software s—t is absurd.” That was your private assessment of the Dominion voting-machine conspiracy then being promoted on your network and others. You called it absurd, in writing, to your producer.

Exhibit three. On November 9, 2020 — the next night — you told your audience on air: “We don’t know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night. We don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged… our system isn’t what we thought it was. It’s not as fair as it should be. Not even close.”

Absurd in private, stolen on television, on consecutive days. The jury will note the gap between Exhibit Two and Exhibit Three is less than twenty-four hours.

Exhibit four. On November 13, 2020, you wrote privately that Trump needed to concede, and explicitly agreed that “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election.

Exhibit five. On November 16, 2020, three nights later, you told your audience: “Millions of Americans understandably are asking these questions. Our current system does not inspire confidence. People have legitimate concerns about the integrity of our elections.”

Exhibit six. On the same day — November 16, 2020 — you texted a Fox producer about Sidney Powell, who was at that moment appearing on Fox News promoting the Dominion conspiracy to millions of viewers: “Sidney Powell is lying. Fucking bitch.”

Exhibit seven. You texted Laura Ingraham the same day: “The whole thing seems insane to me, and Sidney Powell won’t release the evidence.”

Exhibit eight. On November 17, 2020, you texted Sidney Powell directly: “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon. You’ve convinced them that Trump will win. If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”

Exhibit nine. On November 18, 2020, you texted Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.” And: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”

Our viewers are good people and they believe it.

Let the jury sit with that sentence. You knew your viewers were good people. You knew they believed what they were being told. You knew what they were being told was a lie. You said so, in writing, to people you worked with, while your network continued broadcasting the lie and while you yourself continued going on the air and telling those good people that their concerns about the integrity of the election were legitimate, that the software was suspect, that the system was not fair.

Exhibit ten. On November 21, 2020, you wrote that it was “shockingly reckless to claim Dominion rigged election if there’s no one inside the company willing to talk, or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it — as you know there isn’t.”

Exhibit eleven. On November 23, 2020, you told your audience: “You’ve heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines. This is a real issue, no matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. Electronic voting is not as secure as traditional hand counting. Period.”

Shockingly reckless in writing on Saturday. A real issue that should not be dismissed as a conspiracy theory on air the following Monday. The jury will note a pattern.

Exhibit twelve. On January 4, 2021, two days before the Capitol insurrection, you texted about Trump: “I hate him passionately. I can’t handle much more of this.” And: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

Exhibit thirteen. On January 7, 2021, hours after a mob had stormed the Capitol at the president’s direction, you texted Pfeiffer: “Trump is a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.”

Exhibit fourteen. On July 18, 2024, three and a half years later, you stood on the stage of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and told the nation that Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt was “divine intervention” and “a transformation,” that Trump was “no longer just a political party’s nominee — this was the leader of a nation,” that Trump was “the bravest man,” and — I am quoting — “God is among us right now. And I think that’s enough.”

What was demonic in 2021 was divine in 2024. What was a destroyer became the vessel of God. The conversion happened in public, at full volume, in front of a television audience, delivered by a man who had put on the stage of the Republican National Convention the same face he had put on the screen of Fox News every weeknight for years — the face of a man delivering, with apparent sincerity, whatever content the arrangement required him to deliver at that moment. The sincerity is the product. The content is whatever will sell.

The record is not ambiguous. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is a series of statements, made in writing by Tucker Carlson himself, contemporaneously with the public statements they contradict, establishing beyond any possible dispute that he said, in private, exactly the opposite of what he said, in public, to millions of people who trusted him.

The man who now tells us I’m sorry for misleading people — it was not intentional is the same man who wrote, in real time, that Sidney Powell was lying, that the software claims were absurd, that the fraud allegations were shockingly reckless, that his viewers were good people being deceived, that Trump was a demonic force and a destroyer. He said these things while going on television and telling his audience the opposite. He cannot plead confusion. He cannot plead that he was working from imperfect information. He cannot plead that he was caught up in a narrative he later came to doubt. The written record establishes, with the kind of specificity that only discovery in a federal defamation case can produce, that he understood his public statements to be false at the moment he was making them, that he characterized them to his colleagues with unusual vividness as lies, and that he continued making them anyway because the financial and professional cost of stopping was higher than the moral cost of continuing.

In April 2023, Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to make the defamation case go away before Carlson and the other Fox primetime hosts had to testify under oath about what has just been described. It is the largest media defamation settlement in American history. A week later, Fox fired him. Among the factors in his firing, according to reporting at the time, was the board’s concern about texts — including one in which Carlson, discussing Trump supporters beating a protester, wrote “It’s not how white men fight” — that the company did not want exposed in further proceedings.

He landed on X, then on a subscription platform of his own, then on one of the most successful podcasts in the country. He traveled to Moscow and conducted a flattering, unchallenged interview with Vladimir Putin — Putin’s first Western-media interview after invading Ukraine — and filmed himself in a Russian grocery store praising the quality of life under an authoritarian regime at war. He spent time in Hungary promoting Viktor Orbán’s model of electoral autocracy to American audiences. He hosted, on his podcast, the open white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes for more than two hours of fawning conversation during which Fuentes described Jews as “unassimilable” and advanced classical antisemitic conspiracies without pushback. He stood at the Republican convention and declared that God was among us. He did all of this, in public, for four years, after the Dominion texts were a matter of public record. He never apologized for any of it. He never addressed it.

Then, on April 20, 2026, after the Trump administration launched a war with Iran that Carlson opposed — opposed because the war cost him standing with the segment of the right he had cultivated, opposed because Trump’s coalition was fracturing and Carlson had to choose which fragment to stand with — Tucker Carlson sat down on his own podcast with his brother and said he was sorry for misleading people, and that it was not intentional.

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So. That is the record. Let the court note what follows from it.

The apology is a positioning statement dressed as contrition. It is calibrated to the present moment. It is not responsive to the Dominion record, because the Dominion record has been public for three years and Carlson has made no apology for any of it. It is responsive to the Iran war and the break with Trump, because the Iran war and the break with Trump are the current facts that affect his access to the specific audience he is now trying to hold. The apology arrives when the apology is useful. It refers to whatever needs referring to in order to be useful. The vocabulary of contrition is the instrument. The instrument is being deployed to manage a specific commercial and political problem — which is that a portion of Tucker Carlson’s audience is now repelled by Trump, and Tucker Carlson, like all opportunists, must move with the portion of the audience that pays.

The word misleading is not a failure of precision. It is a chosen word. It is chosen because it does specific work. Misleading implies the misleader may himself have been confused, or may have presented information ambiguously, or may have conveyed a false impression through imprecision rather than deliberate falsehood. It is the vocabulary of error. It is the vocabulary that lets the speaker claim moral credit for acknowledging a problem while denying the nature of the problem. The problem was not that Tucker Carlson misled his audience. The problem is that Tucker Carlson lied to his audience, with full knowledge of the truth, for years, for money, and has now decided — because the balance of his commercial interest has shifted — that he would like to be forgiven for something less than what he actually did. The apology is an attempt to substitute a misdemeanor confession for a felony indictment, in the hope that the audience will accept the substitution and move on.

It was not intentional is the other chosen phrase, and it is itself a fresh lie, delivered at the moment of apology, about the conduct being apologized for. The Dominion texts establish intent beyond anything a defendant in a fraud case could hope to deny, but one text in particular forecloses the not intentional plea with finality. On November 17, 2020, Tucker Carlson wrote to Sidney Powell directly. Not to a producer. Not to a colleague. To Powell herself, while she was actively promoting the Dominion conspiracy on his network to millions of people. The message: “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon. You’ve convinced them that Trump will win. If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”

That is the definition of intentional knowledge. He wrote to her, by name, and told her the thing she was saying was cruel and reckless. Then he went on air and told his audience her concerns were legitimate. If the word intentional has any content in the English language, that sequence is what it names. A man who writes to a liar, calls her out privately for lying, and then provides her an audience to continue lying to, is not a man who can later claim — six years later, when the political calculus has turned — that what he did was not intentional. He did not stumble into the fraud. He identified the fraud, in writing, to the fraudster, and then participated in it anyway. To say at this late date that it was not intentional is to attempt, in real time, to rewrite the record that everyone with access to a search engine can now read. It is not a lapse in the apology. It is the craft of the apology. The apology’s central rhetorical move is the same move that made the original fraud work: say the thing you need to say, in the moment you need to say it, to the audience you need to say it to, and count on the audience’s exhaustion and goodwill to let you get away with it.

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Tucker Carlson is a nihilistic opportunist who discovered, early in his career, that there is a large and loyal audience for a certain kind of performance — a performance in which a man in a bow tie or an open collar, affecting the voice of the plainspoken everyman, delivers to that audience whatever version of reality will keep them watching, keep them angry, keep them subscribed, keep the ad money flowing and the investors happy and the speaking fees climbing. The content of the performance is whatever it needs to be. The election was stolen, until it wasn’t. Trump was a demonic destroyer, until he was divinely anointed. Putin is a reasonable leader America misunderstands. Nick Fuentes is a young man worth hearing out. Hungary is a model for America. Christian Zionists are contemptible, until they are not, until they are again, in a different register, for a different audience.

There is no floor. There is no principle he has not subordinated to the extraction strategy. There is no position he has held that a sufficient change in his commercial environment could not cause him to reverse. This is the defining feature of the kind of man he is. It is not a feature he hides. It is visible in every phase of his career, to anyone who looks. He is a sophist in the ancient sense — a man who has mastered the forms of moral speech without any underlying commitment to the moral substance the forms exist to express — except that the Sophists of Athens at least charged honest fees and admitted that rhetoric was their product. Carlson sells sincerity as the product. The sincerity is the fraud. The fraud is the business.

What is happening right now is that the commercial environment has changed. Trump has broken with the isolationist wing of his coalition by going to war in Iran. Carlson’s brand is built on the isolationist, anti-interventionist, anti-establishment posture that now puts him at odds with Trump. The audience he has cultivated — the Candace Owens audience, the Steve Bannon audience, the audience that believes American power abroad is itself the problem — is split from the Trump audience that supports the war. Carlson must choose. He has chosen. He has chosen the faction that stays, because the faction that stays is the faction that pays. The apology is not an apology for the lies. It is a hedge against the possibility that the Trump coalition recovers and closes him out. I am sorry for supporting him is the sentence he needs to say in order to remain plausibly in business if the whole Trump project collapses. It has nothing to do with Dominion. It has nothing to do with the people he deceived. It has to do with access.

This is not a moral act. It is not a moral category of act. It is a business move. It is the move of a man who has, correctly, calculated that his continued ability to extract audience and income from the public performance of sincerity requires him to perform a specific gesture right now, and so he is performing it. The gesture is calibrated to concede the minimum required to remain plausible. The minimum required is I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional. Anything more specific — any acknowledgment of the Dominion record, any naming of Sidney Powell, any engagement with the seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars, any mention of the election workers who received death threats because of content he broadcast while privately calling it absurd — would be too much, because it would foreclose too many future options. The vagueness is the point. The vagueness is what preserves the apology’s flexibility for the next pivot.

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Tucker Carlson is an instance of a pattern the American media economy now produces in such numbers that the type is legible as a type. The figure performs the vocabulary of some tradition they were formed inside — journalism, conservatism, religion, populism, dissent — and uses the vocabulary’s moral authority as cover for a career built on saying whatever, at any given moment, the most profitable audience wants to hear. The vocabulary is not the content. The vocabulary is the instrument. The content is whatever the quarterly numbers require.

When the figure is caught in a lie big enough that the vocabulary cannot absorb it, the figure performs an apology. The apology is carefully engineered. It names a small thing while gesturing at a large one. It uses the language of error for what was deliberate fraud. It expresses torment without specifying what the torment is for. It concedes enough to look human and hides enough to keep the options open. The apology is itself a product of the same cynical craftsmanship that produced the original lie. The apology is not the figure setting down the tool. The apology is the tool being used again.

The apology works, most of the time, because the audience is tired, because the media cycle is short, because the alternative to accepting the apology is carrying the record forward alone against a current of institutional forgetting. The apology works because the audience wants to believe that the figure was in good faith all along, and has merely made mistakes, because believing otherwise would require admitting that they have spent years listening to a man who held them in contempt. The apology works because the mainstream press is eager for a rehabilitation narrative — a story about growth, about reconsideration, about a figure who got it wrong and is now reckoning with it — because rehabilitation stories are cleaner and more commercially viable than the alternative, which is moral judgment.

I am refusing to participate.

I am refusing because the texts exist and I have read them. I am refusing because the record is in the public domain and anyone who wants to read it can. I am refusing because misleading is not the word for what Tucker Carlson did. Lying is the word. Defrauding is the word. Knowingly poisoning the political reality of millions of Americans while privately expressing contempt for them and for the lies he was feeding them is the longer description. The word Tucker Carlson selected for himself was chosen to replace these words. The refusal to accept his apology is the refusal to accept the replacement.

This matters because the country has business to do. Donald Trump is still president. The damage Tucker Carlson contributed to is still unfolding. The people whose lives were ruined by the Dominion conspiracy — the election workers hounded by death threats, the voting-machine employees forced into hiding, the communities whose civic fabric was poisoned by the conviction that their government was illegitimate — have not been made whole, and will not be. No apology from Tucker Carlson would restore them. A true apology would at least acknowledge them. This apology does not. This apology acknowledges only Tucker Carlson. Its subject is his torment. Its audience is his future market.

He is a deeply disturbed man. I do not say that as a diagnosis. I say it as the plainest description of what the public record shows: a man who spent years telling millions of people things he believed to be lies, who privately expressed contempt for them while publicly flattering them, who has continued, in every venue available to him after his firing, the same pattern of deception in the service of whichever authoritarian figure currently serves his commercial interests, and who now — at the first moment when that pattern requires the vocabulary of contrition to preserve his options — deploys that vocabulary with the same strategic precision he has deployed every other instrument in his career. A man who could build what Tucker Carlson has built, and say what Tucker Carlson has said, and do what Tucker Carlson has done, and sleep through the nights during which millions of Americans were being made into worse versions of themselves by what he was doing, is not a man whose apology is adequate information about his moral state. The apology is information about his strategy.

Nobody should look to this man for moral leadership. Nobody should treat his apology as a real apology. Nobody should extend him the presumption of good faith that the apology attempts to claim. He has not earned it. He has spent twenty years demonstrating, in public, that the presumption of good faith is precisely what he relies on to do what he does. The withdrawal of that presumption is the beginning of taking him seriously.

So, Mr. Carlson, let the record reflect this.

Apology not accepted.

My case-in-chief, Mr. Carlson. Submitted to the jury of history.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Yesterday, Palantir‘s official account posted on X a list of twenty-two excerpts from CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic. “Because we get asked a lot,” the caption read. The post has, as of this writing, nearly thirty million views. I read it and thought it was stupid. Stupid in a specific way — the stupidity of a man who has decided his pronouncements about civilization are civilization. I was going to write nothing about it.

Then I went back and read it again, slowly, against the larger record of what Karp has said in public over the last two years, and I realized the document was not stupid. It was diagnostic. And the thing it was diagnostic of is not an idea, or a policy program, or even a political orientation in the ordinary sense. It is a psychological display. A man in one of the most consequential positions in the American defense-intelligence ecosystem has been, for the better part of two years, showing us something about himself.

I am not a clinician and there are many people who will take issue with me psychologically diagnosing Mr. Karp with some kind of psychopathology in public, without credentials. I mean, I understand why these norms exist. They make sense. Mental health diagnoses can be weaponized to dehumanize people and rob them of their dignity. I agree with all of this. But the man is the CEO of a company that apparently our government runs on. And he strikes me as mentally unwell.

I am not a pacifist. I believe in a conception of just war theory. But I place myself inside a tradition that sees such things as tragic necessities. I believe Ukraine is fighting a just war against Russia for its sovereignty. I want the war to end and for peace to be restored. But only under conditions of justice. I do not revel in the violence which is necessary to establish such a future. Mr. Karp, from what I can tell, is positively delighted at the notion of ending human life. He exhibits what I might characterize as a pornography of violence in the way he talks about these things.

In February 2025, during an investor call, Karp said this: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.” He said this with what observers have described as a smile on his face. He followed it, moments later, with this: “We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir. Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

Some people are going to get their heads cut off. On an investor call.

At an AI conference on Capitol Hill in May 2024, Karp joked about drone-striking his business rivals. In the same appearance, speaking about campus protesters whose politics he disapproves of, he proposed an exchange program: “We’re gonna do an exchange program sponsored by Karp. A couple months in North Korea, nice-tasting flavored bark. See how you feel about that.” When a protester interrupted him at another forum a year later, he watched her removed from the room and remarked that he had not had so much fun in years. “Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. He later described the protester as “an unwitting product of an evil force.”

At the World Economic Forum, he dismissed the United Nations as “basically a discriminatory institution against anything good.” On earnings calls he has returned, again and again, to the theme of Palantir‘s role in helping the West kill its enemies more efficiently, framed as a moral duty and an investment thesis simultaneously. “The obvious solution to war is to have the West have the strongest and most precise deadly weapons possible,” he told an audience after the May 2025 protester interruption, “so we can minimise unnecessary deaths, and the best way you minimise those deaths is that you’re so strong that nobody attacks you.”

Nothing this man is saying can possibly be viewed as serious by anyone who has spent more than a moment considering the broader context of history. The last half of the twentieth century was a period of unprecedented declines in global conflict — the longest stretch without great-power war in modern history, and a decline in inter-state violence that reshaped what human life could be for billions of people. The architecture that made this possible was not built by hard power alone. It was built by the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the international humanitarian law framework, the European project, and a web of alliances and norms that Karp dismisses out of hand in favor of a vision of deterrence through better targeting software. A man advocating the undoing of the postwar settlement — “the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone” — is advocating the undoing of the architecture that produced the peace he claims to want to preserve.

I must confess, as I dive deeper into this deconstruction of Karp and this 22-point plan for a “Technological Republic” — which is apparently summarized from his New York Times bestselling book that I have largely ignored and have no intention of reading — that it is taking some discipline to even bring myself to keep going here. That this violent imagery features so prominently in his thoughts invites questions about the potential presence of a psychopathy. It is obvious to me. And yet, a lot of very special people among us need to be hand-held through this in order for them to see it. So I continue.

Karp and his repeating imagery of killing.

He does not say Palantir helps its partners succeed. He says Palantir helps its partners “scare and on occasion kill enemies.” He does not say market disruption is uncomfortable. He says “some people are going to get their heads cut off.” He does not say he disagrees with campus protesters. He jokes about sending them to North Korea for re-education and eating bark. He does not say he regrets business conflicts. He muses about drone-striking rivals. He does not say he found the protester’s interruption frustrating. He says he “had not had so much fun in years” and may “come back tomorrow.”

The relationship between the speaker and the violence he is describing is not the relationship of a person who has thought carefully about violence and concluded, regretfully, that it is sometimes necessary. It is the relationship of a person for whom the imagery of violence appears to produce pleasure. The smile that observers have noticed on his face during earnings calls is the tell. The “fun” he reported having at the protester’s expense is the tell. The drone-strike joke is the tell. Each individual tell can be dismissed. The aggregate cannot. A person who repeatedly, in public, returns to the same imagery and shows positive affect toward it is displaying something about their inner life. The display is not subtle.

And the imagery is specific. It is not the generic imagery of hard power or strategic deterrence that you would expect from a defense-industry CEO performing the required vocabulary. It is the imagery of killing people, personally. “Scare and kill them.” “Heads cut off.” “Drone-strike rivals.” “An unwitting product of an evil force” about a protester. The grammatical subjects are concrete. The verbs are violent. The objects are specific human beings or categories of human beings. This is not a man describing the abstract machinery of national defense. This is a man describing, with evident enjoyment, the application of lethal force to identifiable targets.

If your neighbor spoke this way at a dinner party, you would not invite him back. If your cousin spoke this way, you would worry. If a public school teacher spoke this way, the teacher would be in the principal’s office by Monday. The social register for ordinary humans contains rules about how often, and with what affect, one is permitted to return to imagery of killing one’s enemies. Karp has been violating those rules in public, in front of cameras, for years. The rules exist because most human communities have noticed that people who return to the imagery of killing the people they dislike are a specific kind of person, and that kind of person is not the kind of person communities elevate to positions of power. Karp has been elevated anyway. The elevation does not mean the rules were wrong. It means the people who elevated him were not paying attention to what they were looking at.

Then there is the other register, which runs alongside the violence register and is its constant companion. “The West is obviously superior,” he told CNBC, as if this were a daring insight he was delivering to an audience too cowardly to receive it. “We will be the most important software company in the world,” he has declared. When he speaks about Palantir, he speaks as though he were describing the technological wing of Western civilization itself. “We are dedicating our company to the service of the West,” he has said, “and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”

Places we can’t talk about. The phrase is the self-aggrandizement of a teenager writing a spy novel. Every defense contractor on earth has places they can’t talk about. The phrase is doing rhetorical work, not informational work. The work is to position the speaker as privy to a level of consequence and secrecy beyond the comprehension of the audience. The audience is invited to feel awed. The invitation is the tell.

Put the registers together and you see the posture: the speaker is a great man engaged in great matters, his enemies are both absurd and dangerous, his work is civilizationally necessary, and his willingness to contemplate killing his enemies is a measure of his seriousness rather than an alarming departure from ordinary human norms. The self is inflated. The enemies are demonized. The violence against the enemies is offered as evidence of the greatness of the self. The shape is recognizable even to a layman.

One more thing is worth knowing, because it changes what the display actually is. Karp has a PhD in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. He has been allowed, for years, to have it reported that he studied under Jürgen Habermas. He did not. His actual supervisor was Karola Brede, a social psychologist at the Sigmund Freud Institute. Moira Weigel did the archival work on this in 2020 and published it in Boundary 2. The Habermas myth is a useful piece of decoration — it supplies the critical-theory credentials that inoculate Palantir against the critique that a surveillance company run by a Habermas student could not possibly be building what it is building. The myth does this work precisely because it is false.

Karp’s dissertation, published in 2002, is titled Aggression in the Life-World. Its opening sentence: “This work began with the observation that many statements have the effect of relieving unconscious drives, not in spite, but because, of the fact that they are blatantly irrational.” He wrote his PhD on exactly the phenomenon I have been describing. He studied, academically, the mechanism by which irrational public utterances relieve unconscious aggressive drives. He is now, on investor calls, making irrational public utterances about killing that relieve unconscious aggressive drives — and the market applauds. He understood the mechanism well enough to get a doctorate for describing it. He is now performing the mechanism he once described. The Frankfurt School tradition, whatever his relationship to it actually was, has a specific commitment to emancipation from exactly this kind of dynamic. Weigel’s conclusion: Karp “adapts Frankfurt School concepts for technical purposes” and “in the process, he also abandons the Frankfurt School commitment to emancipation.” He abandoned the tradition somewhere between the dissertation and the seven-billion-dollar net worth.

And the enemies are a recurring cast. Campus protesters. The United Nations. China. Progressive academics. Woke pagans. Google employees who refused to work on Project Maven. The pattern of his descriptions is consistent. They are not people with views he disagrees with. They are products of an evil force, adherents of a thin pagan religion, praying at altars, corrupting the civilization he is defending. The vocabulary is eschatological. His opponents are not interlocutors in a democracy. They are spiritual adversaries in a cosmic struggle, and he is the designated instrument of the civilization’s response.

None of this, he wants you to understand, makes him a reactionary. Karp calls himself a liberal. He voted for Kamala Harris, he has said. He donated to Democratic candidates. He describes himself, in interviews, as progressive but not woke. And this self-description is the permission structure that lets the rest of it travel. It allows Karp to deliver the most reactionary content imaginable — civilizational superiority, pagan religion as a category of political analysis, the suggestion that college protesters should be sent to North Korea for re-education, the continuous celebration of lethal force against enemies — while claiming the authority of a reformed or honest progressive who has seen through the excesses of his own side. The rhetorical effect is to make readers who would reject the same content from an open reactionary listen to it from Karp. Even liberals are saying this now, the framing allows. Karp is one of us and he has come to tell us hard truths.

There is no serious sense in which Karp is a liberal. A liberal is a person who holds a specific set of commitments: to the legitimacy of democratic contestation, to the moral equality of persons regardless of their position in cultural hierarchies, to the protection of individual rights against concentrated power, to the maintenance of institutions that preserve the possibility of the commitments themselves. Karp’s public record is the systematic violation of every one of these commitments. He treats democratic protest as pagan religion. He celebrates the application of lethal force against designated enemies. He advocates the reduction of oversight over the powerful and the intensification of surveillance over the weak. He frames civilizational hierarchies as self-evident. He welcomes the Trump administration’s deconstruction of federal capacity as revolution and pronounces, with relish, that “some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

The liberal self-identification is not a contradiction to be puzzled over. It is a performance to be decoded. It is the specific performance of a kind of reactionary figure who understands that open reactionary identification would cost him access to a particular segment of the elite audience — the Silicon Valley-adjacent, the centrist financial press, the Aspen-ish convening class — and who therefore preserves the aesthetic of liberalism while holding the commitments of the reaction. The performance is useful to the reaction because it supplies the reaction with a figure the liberal audience will hear. That is what Karp is for, in the current configuration of the American right. He is the liberal who has been converted by his own experience to say what the reactionaries want said.

Which brings me back to the document, the twenty-two excerpts Palantir posted on X, the Technological Republic in brief. Read it against his public statements and the function becomes visible. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country — which licenses the demand that Silicon Valley serve the defense apparatus Palantir sells to. Soft power is insufficient; hard power is built on software — which is the Palantir product pitch translated into civilizational vocabulary. The question is not whether AI weapons will be built but who will build them — which is the argument that moral objections to AI weapons are irrelevant, because the weapons will exist either way, and therefore the only serious question is whether Palantir will profit from them or its competitors will. National service should be universal — which produces a larger military, a larger military produces more procurement, more procurement produces more Palantir contracts. If a Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it, and the same for software — which is the argument against any form of ethical constraint on defense procurement, framed as solidarity with troops. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone — which is advocacy for the expansion of the defense markets Palantir serves. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime — which is the domestic Palantir sales pitch, because Palantir sells predictive-policing tools to law enforcement, and the item frames the sales pitch as civic concern. Some cultures are better than others — which provides the philosophical license for the hierarchy Karp’s business interests depend on, the hierarchy under which the West’s prerogative to surveil, target, and kill its designated enemies is underwritten by the West’s civilizational superiority.

Every proposition in the document, on inspection, points toward the same outcome: more authority for Palantir, more markets for Palantir‘s products, less oversight over the class Palantir belongs to, and less cultural constraint on the application of lethal force to the targets Palantir helps its clients acquire. The civilizational vocabulary is not a frame through which the underlying interests are viewed. It is the laundering mechanism through which the underlying interests are presented as civilizational duty.

And a person who does not notice they are doing this is more alarming than a person who does. The tell, in the document and in the public record, is the absence of friction. A person engaged in genuine civic reasoning eventually reaches a position that costs them something. Karp’s civic reasoning never does. Every position he takes, on every question he addresses, happens to align exactly with what is good for Palantir. This is not evidence that he is engaged in cynical self-interest. It is evidence that the self-interest and the worldview have fused so completely that the worldview no longer performs the work of checking the self-interest. There is no longer a place inside the worldview from which the self-interest could be seen as self-interest. This is a specific pathology of the ideological self, and it is what you would expect from a person who has spent two decades being told by everyone in his proximity that his business is civilization.

When I listen to Karp talk, I hear a man who has built himself a future he finds beautiful. In the future he has built, the West prevails by killing its enemies with software. Palantir‘s tools pick the targets. The targets die. The survivors learn to be afraid. And the man describing this to investors, to reporters, to whoever will have him, cannot quite hide how much he likes the sound of it.

There is pleasure in it. That is the thing I keep coming back to. Not the grim satisfaction of a person who has looked at violence and concluded, with sorrow, that it is sometimes necessary. Something else. The pleasure of a person who has at last been permitted to live inside his preferred picture of the world — a world where the categories are finally clean, the enemies are finally named, and the violence against them is finally licensed as civilizational duty rather than as the appetite it actually is.

In this picture, there is no room for the protester who interrupts the panel and accuses Palantir of killing her family. There is only the option of escorting her out and remarking on how much fun you had. There is no room for the Gaza civilians who have no military affiliation and no political agency and who have been dying by the tens of thousands. There is only the abstract mathematics of “minimizing unnecessary deaths” through the application of the most precise deadly weapons the West can produce. There is no room for the university student who thinks American foreign policy has been unjust. There is only the category of pagan religion adherent who should perhaps be sent to North Korea to eat flavored bark.

I hear a man whose picture of his own righteousness has so fully saturated his perception of reality that the reality’s capacity to resist the picture has been lost. The bark joke, the drone-strike joke, the heads-cut-off joke, the North Korea joke — these are the utterances of a mind that has lost the feedback mechanism that tells ordinary humans when they have said something they should not have said. The mechanism has been replaced by the laughter of the audience at the conferences and the applause of the market on the earnings calls. The laughter and the applause have confirmed, over and over, that the imagery of killing Karp’s designated enemies is a thing he is right to enjoy. The enjoyment has deepened. The utterances have intensified. And now we are where we are.

Where we are is this: a man who runs a company that provides the software infrastructure for American and allied military targeting has built, over years, a public persona organized around the pleasure he takes in contemplating the application of lethal force to designated enemies. He does not hide this. He announces it. He announces it on earnings calls, at defense forums, on CNBC, in his book, in his tweets. And the institutions he serves have not blinked. The financial press reports the statements as colorful. The investors buy the stock. The defense department renews the contracts. The lawmakers invite him back to speak.

I cannot say with certainty what is going on inside Alex Karp. I am not a clinician. But I can read. And what I read is a man who should not be the CEO of a company. Certainly not the CEO of one of the critical software contractors in the American national-security architecture. A man whose register about violence, enemies, and his own relationship to both has drifted so far from what any functioning civic institution should tolerate in its elite class that the ongoing toleration is itself evidence of institutional decay.

I am not saying this in order to shame Karp. Shame is not available to a man in Karp’s position, and Karp has demonstrated in any case that he is not subject to it. I am saying it because the display is evidence. It is evidence about the ideological formation of a specific faction of the American oligarchy, and about what that faction has come to consider acceptable speech from its leading representatives, and about what kind of speech the American media and political establishment will tolerate in exchange for the access and advertising revenue that such representatives supply.

The faction is not marginal. It controls, through Palantir, substantial portions of the American intelligence and military software stack. It controls, through Thiel’s network, portions of the Republican Party including the Vice Presidency. It controls, through its alliance with the broader tech-right, a growing share of the media environment in which political ideas are formed. The faction’s ideological project is the one Karp articulates in The Technological Republic and the one he performs on earnings calls. The project is the fusion of American military power, corporate defense contracting, civilizational-hierarchy ideology, and the explicit celebration of lethal force against designated enemies, delivered in the vocabulary of civic renewal.

A person who fantasizes, in public, about drone-striking business rivals and sending protesters to North Korea is not a person who should be near the instruments of state violence. A person who laughs on earnings calls about heads being cut off in a revolution is not a person whose picture of American civic life is one a republic should entrust with its surveillance infrastructure. A person whose corporate worldview celebrates “scaring and killing enemies” as a product feature is not a person whose ethical constraints on targeting decisions can be assumed. These are the plainest possible observations, and the fact that they have to be made at all is a function of how badly the institutions that should have noticed have failed to notice.

I wrote in The Positive Case for Liberalism that the positive case must be made again because the ambient discourse has forgotten what it is for. This is what it is for. It is for the preservation of a civic order in which the kind of man Alex Karp has become does not hold the kind of power Alex Karp holds. It is for the maintenance of institutions that recognize the difference between a serious public figure and a man displaying the psychological features of someone who has spent too much time fantasizing about killing. It is for a culture capable of noticing, when one of its oligarchs begins speaking the way Karp has been speaking, that the speaking is evidence, and that evidence of this kind ought to produce a response.

We are not producing the response. Karp continues to speak. Palantir‘s stock continues to rise. The contracts continue to be awarded. The Capitol Hill forums continue to invite him. The financial press continues to describe his statements as colorful. This continuation is not the absence of judgment. It is the presence of a specific judgment, which is the judgment that the display is acceptable because the money is good and the access is useful. This judgment will be remembered.

The display will also be remembered. The record of what Karp has said is preserved in earnings-call transcripts, in video clips, in the book he published and continues to promote. When the consequences of the fusion he represents become visible in a form the current political economy can no longer disguise, the record will be there. The drone-strike joke will be there. The North Korea joke will be there. The “some people are going to get their heads cut off” will be there. The smile on his face while he said these things, which was not hidden, which was published and repeated and celebrated at the time, will be there.

Moral witness is not primarily for the present. It is for the record. I am writing this for the record, because someone should, and because the ongoing failure of the institutions that should be writing it is one of the facts about our moment that the record should also show.

Alex Karp is a deeply troubled man. I submit my witness of this to my posterity. And I look forward to the congressional hearings to come when the Democrats take control of Congress.

Go Deeper into the Circus

In April 1932, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary: “All I know is that I wish Soviet communism to succeed — a wish which tends to distort one’s judgement.”

She wrote that sentence while touring the Ukrainian famine. She wrote it during the months when Stalin’s grain requisitions were converting the breadbasket of the Soviet Union into a charnel house. She wrote it as a Fabian socialist of impeccable credentials — co-founder of the London School of Economics, pillar of the British intellectual left, serious thinker.

The diary entry records the exact mechanism of her failure. She knew the wish was distorting her judgment. She named it. She continued.

The result was Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, published in 1935 — two volumes of elaborate argument that the famine did not exist, that the show trials were fair, that the one-party state was a working democracy under the enlightened guidance of a vanguard. The question mark was later removed from the title. She was by then certain.

She was wrong about everything. She was wrong in the way that people are wrong when they have decided in advance what the answer must be and then go looking for reasons. The reasons came. The reasons always come.

Every generation of the Western left produces its own version of this failure. It has happened so many times, across so many decades, with so many different authoritarian regimes cast in the role that the Soviet Union once played, that the pattern has earned a name. I am going to use the term neo-campism going forward. It is back. It is back with China.

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We should walk through the pattern with some degree of care, because it is a repeating pattern and learning to recognize malignant social patterns is the first step to building our collective resistance to them.

Step one: correctly identify a real Western failure. Imperialism, racial violence, economic exploitation, the military-industrial complex, the hypocrisy of liberal power — all real, all worth naming, all properly the targets of serious leftist critique.

Step two: find an authoritarian alternative positioned as the enemy of that Western power. Stalin’s Soviet Union. Mao’s China. Castro’s Cuba. Chávez’s Venezuela. Now Xi’s China.

Step three: attribute the alternative’s apparent successes to its ideology. Soviet industrialization. Chinese economic growth. Cuban healthcare. Venezuelan poverty reduction. The high-speed rail, the cheap solar panels, the absence of billionaires on visible corporate boards.

Step four: minimize or deny the human cost. The Ukrainian famine did not happen. The Cultural Revolution did not kill intellectuals. The Khmer Rouge reports are CIA propaganda. The Venezuelan opposition is a coup attempt. The Uyghur camps are vocational schools.

Step five: frame credible criticism as serving imperial interests. Anyone pointing out what is happening is a Cold Warrior, a propagandist, a dupe.

Step six: go silent when the evidence becomes undeniable. The Webbs did not update. Western Maoists went quiet after Deng. Chomsky qualified and reframed but never directly accounted for his Cambodia writing. Corbyn and Owen Jones simply stopped mentioning Venezuela when the shelves emptied.

Step seven: find a new authoritarian alternative and repeat.

None of this is Republican cartooning about the left. The pattern I have described has caught up serious left intellectuals — Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Chomsky and Herman, Corbyn, Owen Jones — across the better part of a century. The pattern does not require stupidity. It requires a prior commitment that overrides evidence. The Webbs knew this. They named it and continued.

Read more

I have been surrounded by Judaism my whole life. I have grown up and lived in places where Jews were my classmates, my teachers, my bosses, my friends — and I have never once been accused by any of them in my life of antisemitism until recently. Until recently, I have walked a fine line in my criticism of Israel. I want to share some of what I have seen throughout my life on this topic, because I think the conversation we are having in public right now is not the conversation the topic deserves.

Antisemitism is real. It is a real bigotry, ancient and persistent, and I have encountered it throughout my life. Whenever I have been faced with it, I have confronted it — aggressively. I will continue to do so, because Jews are humans, like any other humans, and they are my friends and brothers and sisters in shared humanity. That is the long and short of it. This is how I approach life. This is how I think about it and how I will go on thinking, because thinking any other way is stupid.

One cannot set aside the historical trauma of the Holocaust when confronting this topic, because the trauma is real. It has had real effects. It has shaped and formed Jewish contemporary culture, and it should. Hannah Arendt is one of my intellectual and literary heroes in her diagnosis of the nature of totalitarianism and antisemitism. I cite her often in my writing, and her formulation of the banality of evil features heavily in my own contemporary analysis. She is a Jewish intellectual and I put her on a pedestal. She did the hard work of moral witness — of taking the patience to look at evil and try to understand it on its own terms. That she did this is remarkable because doing this is beyond most people’s capacity for tolerating cognitive dissonance. Arendt’s observations about human nature are sobering and they have never been more relevant.

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October 7.

Before I say anything else about the war, I want to say what October 7 was.

It was the deliberate mass murder of Israeli civilians in their homes, at a music festival, in agricultural communities where they had been living. It was sexual violence used as an instrument of terror. It was the taking of hostages, including children and elderly people, some of whom have not come home, some of whom never will. It was filmed by its perpetrators and celebrated in real time by the organization that planned it and, in some places, by people who received the news as vindication of a grievance they had been cultivated to feel. It was not a military operation against a military target. It was a pogrom organized at state scale by an entity that has openly stated its intention to extinguish Jewish presence in the region.

There is no political grievance that justifies what happened on that day. There is no historical context that renders it intelligible as anything other than what it was, which was an atrocity. The fact that it occurred inside a longer history of Israeli occupation, settlement expansion, and the systematic denial of Palestinian political futures does not diminish what it was. It only names the conditions under which an atrocity of that specific character became possible, which is a different claim and a subordinate one.

I write this at the beginning of the essay because the rest of the essay will be critical of Israeli state conduct, and I want the reader to know that my criticism of Israeli state conduct is not offered in competition with an accounting of what was done to Israelis on October 7. Both accountings can be held at once by a serious moral agent. Both accountings must be held at once if the conversation is going to be worth having. I refuse the framing, offered by some on the left, that speaking clearly about October 7 is apology for the occupation. I refuse the framing, offered by some on the right, that speaking clearly about the occupation is apology for October 7. These framings are offered by people who do not want the full accounting because the full accounting is uncomfortable. I want the full accounting.

What has been happening in Gaza.

I have watched, with increasing horror, imagery of human beings’ entire lives being pulverized into ashes. The scale of civilian death in Gaza is not in serious dispute. The destruction of hospitals, schools, residential neighborhoods, the infrastructure that makes ordinary life possible, is documented. The children who have died in Gaza over the course of this war — children who were not yet born when Hamas was founded, children who had no political agency, children whose lives were extinguished before they had the capacity to hold any political view at all — those children are dead. They are not combatants. They are not political actors. They are children, and they are dead, and the responsibility for their deaths is the responsibility of the people who made the decisions that killed them.

I have heard the argument that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, embeds its infrastructure in civilian spaces, and bears moral responsibility for the civilian deaths that occur in the prosecution of Israeli military operations. This argument is not baseless. Hamas does use civilians, does embed infrastructure, does bear moral responsibility for the shape of the battlefield. But this argument, pressed to its conclusion, cannot justify any quantity of civilian death, because at some point the quantity becomes incompatible with any serious claim that the operations are constrained by the principles of proportionality that the laws of armed conflict require. That point has been reached and passed in Gaza. Israeli officials themselves — including former IDF officers, former Shin Bet directors, and writers at Haaretz — have said so publicly. This is not an external critique imposed on Israel from outside. It is a critique Israelis have been making of their own government, and it is a critique I find compelling.

Yes, some Palestinians celebrated the October 7 attacks. They did so because they hate Israelis, and they were taught to hate Israelis and Jews by Hamas propaganda that included Sesame Street-style children’s programming portraying Jews as literal demons and monsters. Hamas has sold its children every antisemitic trope in the book. This is true, and it is documented, and it is part of the moral landscape that any honest analysis has to account for.

But the Palestinians dying in Gaza are overwhelmingly not the Palestinians who celebrated October 7. They are children who cannot have celebrated anything because they were too young to hold a political thought, and women in apartment buildings that were bombed because something military-adjacent was suspected nearby, and elderly people who could not flee, and medical workers, and journalists, and civilians of every category who had no capacity to resist what was being done to them by either side. The moral fact that Hamas indoctrinates its population into antisemitism does not make the population collectively responsible for Hamas, and it does not make the deaths of the uncelebrating majority into a morally lesser category of death.

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The power imbalance.

Many people will be shouting into their screens as I write this — I can feel it — that what I have described is in reaction to what Israel has done. A reaction to settlement expansion. A reaction to the systematic denial of Palestinian political futures. A reaction to the helplessness and desperation of a population that has no meaningful political voice over the circumstances of its own life. This is true. I grant it.

I am not trying to do “both sides.” I am really not. The power imbalance between Palestinians and Israelis is not symmetric. The Israeli state is the state that exists in the territory. It has the military, the borders, the infrastructure, the diplomatic recognition, the nuclear weapons, and the decisive leverage over how Palestinian life is shaped. Violent resistance is a predictable — not justified, but predictable — response from a people who have no political representation over the circumstances of their lives.

Hamas, like any right-wing reactionary movement, has been able to use very real grievance and very real desperation to cultivate its particular form of political vision. The Iranian regime has been crucial in financing and furthering this project. And on the Israeli side, rockets falling on cities and towns have produced dynamics of fear that the Israeli right has been able to capitalize on. In my estimation, and in the estimation of many Israelis themselves — including former prime ministers, former security chiefs, former IDF generals, and a significant intellectual tradition within Israel represented by figures like David Grossman, Amos Oz while he was alive, Gideon Levy, and the staff of Haaretz — Netanyahu came to see Hamas as a useful enemy. Useful for his political purposes at home, useful for ensuring that Palestinians would have no unified basis on which to sue for an independent state. Divide and rule. This is documented. Netanyahu himself has said things consistent with this reading, in his own words, when speaking to his own political allies in Hebrew.

The expansion of settlements in the West Bank and the moves toward outright annexation appear to be the culmination of a project pursued deliberately by the Israeli far right over decades. Not unlike the decades-long efforts in the United States by the American right to capture the courts, degrade state capacity, untether the executive from independent oversight, and ultimately provide the opening for complete state capture. Different ends. Same method.

The Israeli critics I have named hold this view. I hold it because they hold it, and because the evidence they have marshaled is persuasive. When an American gentile makes this argument, it can be dismissed as ignorance or bias. When Israeli Jews make it, as they have for decades, the dismissal is harder to sustain. I am not introducing a view from outside. I am repeating a view from inside, and agreeing with it.

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When criticism becomes antisemitism.

This is the question people ask, sometimes in good faith and sometimes not: how do you know your criticism of Israel is not antisemitism? I think the criteria are actually clear, and I want to state them rather than gesture at them.

Criticism of specific Israeli governments and their specific policies is not antisemitism. Criticism of the current Israeli prime minister on the grounds that he runs a fascist government is not antisemitism when the same standard is applied to other leaders — Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Modi — who exhibit the same characteristics. If the test for fascism is applied uniformly across cases, calling one specific leader fascist for meeting the test is not a special condemnation of the Jewish state. It is a consistent application of a political category.

Criticism of Israeli state conduct in Gaza is not antisemitism when the conduct being criticized is the same conduct Israeli critics are naming in their own press and their own parliament. Importing an argument that Israelis themselves have made is not importing prejudice. It is importing testimony.

What is antisemitism, in my view, is the rhetorical pattern that Einat Wilf named: the serial equation of Zionism with every contemporary evil — Zionism is racism, Zionism is apartheid, Zionism is Nazism, Zionism is genocide, Zionism is white supremacy. The equations are not individually evaluated against the specific historical meaning of the terms. They are deployed ritually, and the ritual function is to require Jews to repudiate Zionism as the condition of their social acceptance. This is coercive and it is antisemitic, and I think Wilf is correct to name it.

My criticism of Netanyahu’s specific government is not that ritual equation. I am not saying Zionism is Nazism. I am not saying Jewish national self-determination is inherently illegitimate. I am saying that the specific government currently running Israel is a fascist government by the same criteria I use elsewhere, and that the specific conduct of that government in Gaza constitutes war crimes by the same criteria I apply elsewhere. These are specific claims about a specific government’s specific actions. They are the kinds of claims that can be argued with on their merits. They are not claims about Jews.

A person who refuses the ritual equations and still criticizes the Israeli government is making political criticism. A person who performs the ritual equations, regardless of what specific government is in power, is doing something different. The line is not between criticism and no-criticism. The line is between specific claims about specific actors and ritual claims about the Jewish national project as such.

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The asymmetric alarm.

What has been fascinating, and disheartening, in my conversations with some Jewish friends on the American right is the degree to which they experience right-wing antisemitism as a minor irritation and left-wing antisemitism as an existential emergency.

When I bring up the Tree of Life synagogue attack — the worst antisemitic massacre in American history, committed by a man radicalized by the same online right-wing ecosystem that produces Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the endless stream of “Great Replacement” content — it is quickly dismissed as an isolated incident. When I bring up the Charlottesville marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us,” it is dismissed as a fringe phenomenon. When I bring up the network of funders, media figures, and politicians who have mainstreamed antisemitic tropes about George Soros, about globalists, about the international financier archetype — it is acknowledged, minimized, and moved past.

But the students protesting for Gaza on university campuses — some of whom have indeed engaged in unacceptable conduct, some of whom have crossed into genuine antisemitism that deserves to be named — these are treated as the emergency. These are the people who keep my friends up at night.

I have struggled to see this as anything other than a deranged view of where the actual threat lies. This is not to say left-wing antisemitism is not a moral emergency. It is. Left-wing antisemitism deserves to be named, confronted, and resisted whenever it appears. But the idea that campus protesters represent a more serious threat to American Jews than an armed white nationalist movement that has already produced the Tree of Life massacre, the Poway synagogue shooting, the Colleyville hostage crisis, and a sustained campaign of neo-Nazi organizing that has now reached the executive branch through figures like Stephen Miller — this is not a serious assessment of comparative risk. It is a political commitment dressed as a threat assessment.

I have made this observation to right-leaning Jewish friends in person, over years, and I am making it again in public. I think the motivating reasoning here is visible, and I think it deserves to be named. When the political movement that is objectively more dangerous to you is also the political movement you are aligned with on other questions, the pressure to minimize its danger is immense. I understand the pressure. I do not think it produces accurate assessments of where the threat lives.

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What the conversation could be.

The conversation about antisemitism we are having in public right now is not a serious conversation. On the left, there is too much willingness to treat the ritual equations of Zionism with every contemporary evil as legitimate political speech rather than as the specific form of antisemitic coercion Wilf has named. On the right, there is too much willingness to minimize the violent antisemitic movement that has organized itself under the Republican tent in the last decade. Among critics of Israel, there is too much rhetorical discipline lost when the specific claim about specific Israeli conduct slides into general claims about Jewish national aspiration. Among defenders of Israel, there is too much willingness to treat any criticism, however grounded in the testimony of Israeli Jews themselves, as antisemitism in disguise.

A serious conversation would hold several things at once. It would hold that October 7 was an atrocity that no political grievance justifies. It would hold that the Israeli state’s conduct in Gaza has crossed the line that Israeli critics themselves have named. It would hold that Hamas is a right-wing reactionary movement that has cultivated real grievance into a specific form of political violence. It would hold that Netanyahu has used Hamas, and that the settlement project is a deliberate undertaking by the Israeli far right. It would hold that antisemitism is a real and ancient bigotry whose victims are human beings deserving of full moral consideration. It would hold that the ritual equations of Zionism with every contemporary evil are antisemitic in effect regardless of the intent of those deploying them. And it would hold that the most immediate violent antisemitic threat in the United States, today, comes from the armed white nationalist movement that has mainstreamed itself within the Republican coalition.

All of these things are true simultaneously. A serious conversation would require all of them to be held simultaneously. The fact that our public discourse cannot hold them simultaneously is a failure of our public discourse, not a sign that the underlying reality is incoherent.

I am trying to hold them simultaneously. I know this will cost me some readers. I have lost readers over the earlier piece, On Israel, and I will lose more over this one. I stand by what I said there and by what I am saying now. The conversation we are having is not the conversation the topic deserves, and the only way to change the conversation is to hold it differently — openly, uniformly, with the full moral weight every side of it deserves.

That is what I am trying to do. That is what I will keep trying to do. And if trying to do it honestly makes me an unreliable ally to any specific faction in the current public debate, I accept that cost, because the alternative is to participate in a conversation that the topic does not deserve and that Jews — the actual human beings, my friends and brothers and sisters in shared humanity — do not deserve either.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I published The Positive Case for Liberalism earlier today. Hours later, Triggernometry released an episode titled “An Honest Conversation with a Christian Nationalist,” featuring Andrew Wilson. I watched it, and I want to write about it immediately, because the episode is a nearly two-hour specimen of the exact failure mode that essay was arguing against — not the failure of liberal intellectuals to make the positive case, but the failure of the broader discourse ecosystem to recognize faux intellectualism when it walks into the room wearing borrowed philosophical vocabulary and a friendly podcast smile.

I have written about Wilson before. Clear Thinking v. Andrew Wilson diagnosed him as the face of a specific kind of intellectual evil — not the evil of stupidity, not the evil of malice exactly, but the evil of using reason’s own tools to corrupt the epistemic ground on which reason operates. That essay was about Wilson. This one is about the ecosystem that platforms him. Because Wilson, on his own, is not a particularly impressive figure. What makes him dangerous is the infrastructure that carries his ideas into the centrist imagination dressed up as legitimate intellectual discourse. The infrastructure is the thing that has to be named.

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The dialectic that isn’t.

Wilson spends much of the episode invoking what he calls “the dialectic.” He describes a framework he says is “dual” — a Left pillar and a Right pillar, arrayed against each other like heraldic banners. The Left pillar: anti-realism, anti-moralism, postmodernism, stance-dependent morality, rights-based reasoning. The Right pillar: realism, moral facts, universal truth, duty-bound, tradition and religion. He presents this as if he is describing a philosophical dialectic, and the word does a great deal of work for him. It establishes him, in the ears of listeners who have heard the word in proximity to serious philosophy, as someone engaged in serious philosophy.

He is not.

A dialectic, in any of the traditions where the word has meaning, is not a sorting hat. In Plato, a dialectic is a method of inquiry through questioning, where contradictions in the interlocutor’s position are exposed and both parties are moved toward truth through the process. The point of the Socratic method is that the inquirer may be wrong too, and the truth emerges through the exchange. In Hegel, a dialectic is the movement of thought and history through contradiction — thesis encountering antithesis, producing a synthesis that incorporates and transcends both. Ideas evolve because they contain internal contradictions that drive them toward resolution. It is explicitly not a binary. In Marx, dialectical materialism locates the engine of historical change in the contradictions within material conditions themselves. Even in Aristotle, dialectic is reasoning from probable premises, carefully distinguished from demonstration and from rhetoric.

Wilson means none of this. When he says “the dialectic,” he means two columns. Left column bad, right column good. The word is doing the work of intellectual authority while the content underneath is a binary sorting scheme any undergraduate would recognize as crude. This is not a dialectic. This is a taxonomy, and a poorly constructed one at that, masquerading as a philosophical method. A genuine dialectician would recognize that his own framework is shot through with contradictions the framework has no way to address. Wilson does not recognize this, because Wilson is not doing philosophy. He is deploying philosophical vocabulary as set dressing for a predetermined conclusion.

Consider what happens when you actually apply dialectical pressure to his own positions.

Wilson claims rights do not exist. You cannot see them, touch them, or taste them. This is an anti-realist position — the same kind of anti-realism he attributes to the Left pillar and treats as fundamentally mistaken. Having disposed of rights on anti-realist grounds, he then asserts that Christian moral facts are universal, stance-independent, and binding on all persons everywhere. This is a realist position about moral facts — the kind of realism he assigns to the Right pillar as its defining virtue. You cannot see Christian moral facts, touch them, or taste them either. The epistemic argument he uses against rights applies with identical force to the foundation of his own moral system, and he does not notice.

In a real dialectic, this contradiction would be the starting point for inquiry. It would be the productive tension from which a synthesis might emerge. In Wilson’s framework, the contradiction is invisible, because the framework is not a method of inquiry. It is a mechanism for producing a predetermined conclusion while dressed in the costume of inquiry.

The Euthyphro problem Wilson does not know he has.

At around the thirty-one minute mark of the episode, Wilson poses what he seems to believe is a devastating argument. Can democracy determine right and wrong? No, he says. A democratic majority could vote to approve slavery. Therefore morality cannot be determined by majoritarian process. Therefore morality must come from an external source — God.

This argument has a name. It is called the Euthyphro dilemma, and Plato identified it in the fourth century BC. The question Euthyphro is asked is this: is a thing good because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is good? If the first, then goodness is arbitrary — whatever the gods happen to command becomes good by the commanding, and moral authority reduces to mere power. If the second, then goodness is independent of the gods — it exists prior to their commands, and they are answerable to it rather than the other way around. Either way, divine command theory fails to ground morality in the way its defenders want it to.

Wilson deploys a version of this problem against democracy and does not notice that the version works against his own alternative with exactly the same force. Divine command is no more immune to the majority-could-vote-for-slavery objection than democratic deliberation. If God could command slavery and thereby make it good, divine command is arbitrary. If God cannot command slavery because slavery is independently bad, then we have acknowledged a moral standard external to God, and the entire theistic grounding project collapses. Wilson’s argument is a first-year philosophy problem that he has not noticed is a problem. He invokes it as if it were a devastating insight. It is, in fact, a 2,400-year-old puzzle that every serious theist since Aquinas has had to grapple with, and Wilson shows no awareness that the puzzle exists.

This is a pattern, and it is the pattern worth naming. Wilson’s philosophical positions are not philosophically considered. They are borrowed vocabulary deployed in service of conclusions he has arrived at by other means — political conclusions, theological conclusions, cultural conclusions. The vocabulary is there to make the conclusions sound rigorous. When the vocabulary is examined on its own terms, the conclusions do not survive.

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The contradiction machine.

Let me lay out the contradictions the episode actually contains, because they matter and because no one on the program bothered to.

Wilson claims rights do not exist because they are not empirically observable, then builds a moral system on divine commands that are not empirically observable. Wilson agrees with the Weberian definition of government as legalized force, then advocates using that force to impose Christian ethics on people who do not share his religion. Wilson attacks the Left for consequentialist reasoning — judging actions by their outcomes rather than by deontological principles — and then justifies Christian rule on the grounds that Christian ethics produce the best outcomes even for non-Christians, which is a straightforwardly consequentialist argument. By his own framework, this is a Left-pillar argument for a Right-pillar conclusion. He does not notice.

Wilson advocates “household voting,” where the husband decides for the family. He frames this as “stakeholder democracy.” It is not stakeholder democracy. It is coverture — the pre-Enlightenment legal doctrine under which a married woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s. The framing as “stakeholder democracy” is euphemism doing the work of disguise, and the disguise is not even good. Anyone who knows the history of married women’s legal status recognizes the old doctrine under the new label immediately. Wilson appears to believe he is proposing something new. He is not. He is proposing something old, dressed in vocabulary that makes it sound modern.

Wilson questions women’s suffrage. He claims there is “no great reason for it.” He justifies the question by saying women “vote to send men to war without draft risk.” This ignores the existence of women in the military, the fact that women have been civilian casualties in every war of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the historical record of women’s suffrage movements and why they succeeded, and essentially the entire moral and political history of the last hundred years. Kisin does not press on any of this. Foster does not press on any of this. The claim enters the discourse having been treated as worthy of consideration.

Wilson advocates a cultural nationalism that he says is not racial. He then specifies: end mass migration immediately. No importing Muslims. Diversity is not a strength. The content of his position is racial. The vocabulary in which he delivers it is not. This is a specific rhetorical technique. It allows the speaker to hold the racial position while claiming not to hold the racial position, and it relies on the audience’s willingness to let the vocabulary do the work the content will not do openly. Nothing in Wilson’s stated policy program would function differently if it were delivered in explicitly racial terms. The effect on Muslims, on non-European migrants, on minority communities within the American polity would be identical. The linguistic distinction is a distinction without a difference, deployed to preserve the speaker’s plausible deniability rather than to preserve any actual substantive difference in policy.

Wilson advocates banning pornography, banning OnlyFans, state control of the airwaves, banning smartphones until eighteen, opting children out of evolution and sex education, and a twelve-point program of state paternalism. He presents this from a position that nominally opposes government overreach. The libertarian-to-authoritarian pipeline is fully on display. It turns out opposition to government overreach is selective — the state should not regulate business, but it should regulate reading material, sexual expression, marriage, education, and family structure. This is not libertarianism. It is theocratic paternalism with a libertarian preamble.

These are not subtle philosophical difficulties. These are first-order contradictions, and any interlocutor with the philosophical equipment to identify them would be obligated to press on them. Neither host did.

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Konstantin Kisin and the civility laundry.

This is where the ecosystem analysis matters, because Wilson on his own is a curiosity. Wilson on Triggernometry is an event. The show’s function is the thing worth naming, because the show does work in the discourse that Wilson could not do alone.

Kisin wrote an essay in November 2024 titled “Fine, Call Me ‘Right-Wing’”. The essay begins with a description of how aggressively he had previously rejected the label — “for years I have aggressively rejected the label” — and proceeds to accept it. This is presented as a reluctant concession to the way the discourse has shifted, and it is presented with careful notes about why he is “still not right-wing” in his own self-understanding. In a subsequent interview some months later, asked directly whether he is right-wing, he said: “No, I’m still not right-wing.” Within a span of months, Kisin publicly accepted the label and then publicly rejected it. This is not a man who has not thought about it. This is a man performing the management of the label as a career maneuver.

The pattern, as documented by observers on r/DecodingTheGurus, is clear and consistent across the archive of the show: the hosts scrutinize and challenge positions associated with the left, rarely express left-leaning views of their own, and rarely deliver strong criticism of right-wing positions. The limited exceptions — mild Trump criticism, support for Ukraine — are the kinds of exceptions that preserve plausible deniability about the overall orientation of the program. The Reddit analysis names the function precisely: the show attempts “to normalize right-wing culture-war rhetoric, dressed up with a veneer of disaffected liberalism.”

The institutional affiliations tell the same story. Kisin has been interviewed by The Atlas Society, Ayn Rand’s organization, whose CEO told him his views “sound a lot like the particular Objectivism that we promote.” Kisin did not push back. He has praised Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party, as Britain’s “best hope.” He reported, in his own words, being “relieved” when Trump won.

I am not going to insist Kisin is right-wing. He will argue about the label for the rest of his career if allowed to, and arguing about the label is precisely the game that the label-management is designed to produce. I will say something more precise. Kisin is a something-reactionary who is excessively comfortable sitting across from fascists, agreeing with their critiques of the left, and treating their prescriptions as worthy of sustained friendly engagement. The label is less important than the pattern. The pattern is the thing.

And the show — the format, the tone, the two-comedians-having-a-conversation framing — is the laundering apparatus. The comedy background is essential. It provides plausible deniability (”we’re just asking questions, we’re comedians”) while the content normalizes reactionary positions. An “honest conversation with a Christian nationalist” in which the hosts never press the foundational contradictions, never invoke the Euthyphro dilemma when divine command is offered as the solution to the is-ought problem, never challenge the rights anti-realism against the Christian moral facts realism, never ask how household voting differs from coverture, never challenge the claim that there is no great reason for women’s suffrage — this is not an honest conversation. It is a performance of conversation, the form of serious engagement without the substance, deployed to move ideas into the mainstream that would not survive an actual interrogation.

This is the civility laundering machine. It takes positions that would be recognized as extremist in any other context — Christian theocratic governance, the elimination of women’s suffrage, restricted male-headed-household franchise, state-controlled media, enforced religious conformity in public life — and processes them through the format of a friendly podcast. The audience, which understands itself to be centrist or moderate or merely curious, absorbs the ideas as within the range of reasonable debate. Once an idea has been within the range of reasonable debate on Triggernometry, it becomes easier to hold the idea in any other venue. The work of the show is to move the Overton window while maintaining the hosts’ plausible deniability about having moved it.

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The corroborating record.

I am not the only one who has noticed what Wilson is doing. Richard Carrier, who actually debated Wilson on Christian Nationalism versus Secular Humanism, documented the pattern in detail. His observation is devastating and worth quoting:

Carrier notes that Wilson “has often hinted that he doesn’t really believe in Christianity and never intends to defend it, but merely construct its promotion on a basis of nihilistic will-to-power, as a means of bending society to his will, ‘for the greater good’ or something.” He describes Wilson’s rhetorical approach as Straussian — constructing Christian nationalism not from sincere theological commitment but as a political instrument. In their debate, Carrier reports that “80% of the remaining 20% of the debate Wilson argued only whether he could use a secular humanist political system to institute Christian Nationalism — which was also not what we were there to debate.” The question on the table was whether he should. Wilson, by Carrier’s account, hardly ever engaged that question.

The Libertarian Christian Institute — Christians, libertarians, people whose good-faith theological and political commitments place them nowhere near my own political position — arrived at the same diagnosis. They documented Wilson’s “philosophical and theological inconsistencies... from its misuse of coercive power to its dangerous flirtations with tribalism and cultural Christianity.”

This is not my idiosyncratic reading. The faux intellectualism is legible to anyone willing to engage Wilson’s claims on their merits. What Triggernometry does is make it possible for audiences to not engage the claims on their merits, by providing a format in which the claims can be expressed and received without the critical labor that would expose them.

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The full policy program.

For the record, these are the positions Kisin and Foster treated as worthy of an “honest conversation”:

Outlaw homosexual marriage. No rainbow flags at the White House, described as prohibiting “glorification and propaganda.” End mass migration immediately, explicitly including a ban on importing Muslims. Household voting, in which the husband decides for the family. Question women’s suffrage, on the grounds that women “vote to send men to war.” Raise the voting age to twenty-five, or restrict the franchise to property owners and those who complete four years of unpaid public service. Ban pornography and OnlyFans. State dominion over the airwaves, specifically including “no naked women on TV.” Ban smartphones until age eighteen. Allow parents to opt children out of evolution and sex education. Christians should rule, because Christian ethics produce the best outcomes even for non-Christians. No blasphemy laws, but no “pro-degeneracy propaganda.”

Taken together, this is a theocratic patriarchal state with a restricted franchise, state-controlled media, enforced religious conformity, and a family structure legally modeled on the coverture doctrine of the eighteenth century. This is the program. The Triggernometry hosts treated it as an interesting perspective worth two hours of friendly exploration.

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What Triggernometry is for.

When I published The Positive Case earlier today, I argued that liberal intellectuals have become rusty at articulating the positive vision of what liberty is and why it is worth defending. I argued that the defensive mode has atrophied the muscle that makes the positive case possible, and that the positive case is what the moment requires. Watching the Triggernometry episode immediately afterward was like watching the diagnosis confirm itself in real time.

Here is a program advocating the dismantling of the liberal framework — the elimination of universal suffrage, the imposition of a state religion, the restriction of civil rights on explicitly theological grounds, the replacement of individual consent with household headship — and the interlocutors are not able to articulate, in real time, what is at stake in the dismantling. They are not able to do it because the positive case for liberalism is not in their working vocabulary. It is not available to them as the ground on which the reactionary program is refuted. The refutation, if it happened, would have to be extemporized out of resources the hosts do not appear to have.

This is the failure the essay named. The reactionary program has a positive vision. It is a bad vision, and it is built on philosophical errors that are visible to anyone willing to look, but it is a vision, and the people advancing it have practiced articulating it, and they have venues in which to articulate it. The liberal response, as performed by the hosts of a show that reaches millions of people, is curiosity without challenge. The curiosity is civility. The absence of challenge is the laundering. And the result, over time, is that ideas which should have been rejected on first contact instead enter the mainstream having been treated as worthy of serious consideration.

The clown car is real. It is not a metaphor. Triggernometry is one of its vehicles, and Wilson is one of the performers inside it. The vehicle looks serious because the hosts are articulate. The performance looks intellectual because the vocabulary is philosophical. The substance is vacuous, internally contradictory, and historically illiterate. The only reason it is received as serious discourse is that the discourse has lost the capacity to recognize faux intellectualism when faux intellectualism walks into the room wearing a borrowed robe.

Someone has to say it. The robe is borrowed. The robe is borrowed, and the man inside it does not know what a dialectic is. The hosts know, or should know, but have professional reasons for not saying so. And the audience, which has been trained to treat “honest conversation” as evidence of intellectual seriousness, absorbs the ideas without the critical apparatus that would have been applied if the ideas had been presented honestly.

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This is what the positive case is for. Not to win arguments against people like Wilson, who are not engaged in arguments in any sense a philosophical tradition would recognize. The positive case is for the audience. It is for the millions of people who will hear this episode and think they have heard a serious exchange. It is for the centrists and the curious and the ambivalent who do not yet know that liberty is beautiful, that democratic self-governance is dignified, that the human life that becomes available under constitutional protection is a life worth wanting and worth defending at whatever cost defending it exacts.

The reactionary program is offering them a story. The story is false, but it is a story. The liberal tradition has stopped telling its own story, in venues where the story would be heard, and the result is that the reactionary story fills the vacuum. Triggernometry is the vacuum being filled in real time.

Someone has to tell the better story. Not because the argument about Wilson’s philosophical incompetence is wrong — it is correct, and it is this essay — but because the argument is downstream of a more basic failure, which is the failure to articulate, in vivid and concrete terms, what liberty actually makes possible that the theocratic patriarchal state would extinguish.

That is the labor. That is the work. And it is what Notes from the Circus is for.

The clown car has arrived. It is time to say so. And it is time, having said so, to continue building the thing that makes the clown car recognizable as what it is — the positive case for the tradition the clown car exists to destroy.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Liberal intellectuals have become experts at arguing what they are against as reactionaries have forced them into the defensive stance. They have become very rusty at making the positive case.

I want to take this observation seriously and develop it, because I think it names something important about why the present moment feels the way it does — and why the liberal response to the reactionary mobilization has been inadequate in a way that is not about effort or intelligence but about mode.

The people doing the defensive work are not bad at it. Many of them are quite good. The critiques of Trump, of the MAGA coalition, of the broligarch ascent, of the Bukeles and the Orbáns and the Yarvinsanities populating the current reactionary imagination — these critiques are being made at high levels of skill by writers I respect and read. The problem is not that the defensive work is being done badly. The problem is that the defensive work has become almost the only work being done, and the work that has been crowded out is the work that actually moves people at the level where politics becomes meaningful to them.

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Why the defensive posture emerged.

It is worth being generous about the conditions that produced the current mode. The reactionary mobilization over the last decade has been real, sustained, and better-organized than most liberal observers were prepared for. It has had money, platforms, institutional vehicles, a theory of itself, and a willingness to pursue its project at a register of seriousness that surprised the people who were expecting the usual oscillations of democratic politics. The response required was not optional. Someone had to document the pattern. Someone had to trace the money. Someone had to name the ideological substrate. Someone had to make the argument, repeatedly and in detail, that the thing that was happening was in fact happening and was in fact what it appeared to be.

That work has been done, and it has been done well. The problem is not that it was unnecessary. The problem is that it has become habitual. The defensive posture, forced on the liberal intellectual class by the urgency of the moment, has calcified into a default mode. Writers who came of age inside the defensive posture now know no other way to write. The capacity to make the positive case — to articulate, from the inside, why liberty is compelling, why democratic self-governance is dignified, why the tradition of ordered freedom under constitutional government is the specific human achievement it is — has atrophied. The muscle is there. The muscle has not been used in a long time.

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What the positive case actually requires.

To see what the defensive mode cannot do, consider what the reactionary project is actually offering. It is not offering a policy argument. It is offering a vision of human life — a picture of order, hierarchy, meaning, belonging, civilizational continuity — that operates at the level of aspiration rather than at the level of consequence. The reactionary says: here is how a life should be lived, here is what a community should look like, here is what it means to be part of something larger than yourself. The picture is wrong in ways that can be named and documented. But the picture is a picture. It is offering something to want.

The defensive response to this works at a different level. The defensive response says: this picture leads to bad outcomes, this picture is historically discredited, this picture misreads human nature, this picture is inconsistent with the evidence. All of these claims may be true. None of them operates at the level where the reactionary picture is doing its work. A reader who is ambivalent about liberal democracy does not need a reader to tell them why the reactionary alternative is flawed. They need someone to tell them why the liberal alternative is worth choosing. The refutation of the alternative is not the affirmation of the choice. These are different operations, and the liberal intellectual ecosystem has spent so long performing the first that it has forgotten how to perform the second.

This is what I mean by rust. The positive case requires a specific set of capacities: the capacity to articulate what a life under liberty actually looks like and why that life is beautiful, the capacity to make the civic inheritance feel like a civic inheritance rather than a procedural arrangement, the capacity to draw on the mythopoetic resources of the tradition rather than ceding them to the reactionaries, the capacity to ground the tradition in a picture of reality that the consequentialist defenses of it do not reach. These capacities are not alien to liberalism. They are constitutive of the tradition at its highest moments. Lincoln had them. Jefferson had them. Frederick Douglass had them. James Baldwin had them. The liberal tradition produced some of the most compelling mythopoetic civic writing in human history. The tradition has not lost the capacity. The current ecosystem has merely stopped exercising it.

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The mistake that made this happen.

The mistake was assuming the answer to the question why liberal democracy was obvious. Everyone knows liberty is good. Everyone knows democracy is better than its alternatives. The job of the liberal intellectual, in this understanding, is to defend what everyone already agrees is the correct arrangement against the specific attacks it is suffering in the moment. The positive case does not need to be made because the positive case is already held. Only the defense is needed.

This was wrong. It has been wrong for some time. The answer to why liberal democracy is not obvious to the generation that has come of age watching liberal democracy fail to deliver on its promises, watching the institutions of liberal democracy be captured by oligarchic interests, watching the consensual fictions of liberal political culture dissolve under the pressure of social media and ideological sorting. The positive case has to be made again, because the inheritance of the positive case has not been transmitted. The people for whom the case was obvious are aging out of the discourse. The people taking their place did not receive the transmission. And the writers who should be making the transmission have been too busy defending against the reactionaries to perform the work.

The result is a generation of potential liberal democrats who have heard the defensive arguments and not heard the positive arguments, and who are therefore vulnerable to any competing vision that operates at the level of aspiration rather than at the level of consequence. The reactionaries are offering such a vision. The liberal intellectuals are offering critiques of that vision. The critiques are not enough. They are not what the moment requires.

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What the positive case looks like when it is made.

I will describe what I mean by the positive case in a register that is itself the positive case, because the alternative is to describe the positive case in the defensive register I am arguing against, which would undercut the point.

Liberty is not the absence of constraint. Liberty is the condition under which human beings get to be the authors of their own lives. It is the political expression of a specific ontological claim: that consciousness, in each of us, is the site where meaning is made, and that no elite, no expert class, no algorithmic optimization, no civilizational tradition, no hierarchical ordering of souls can legitimately substitute its judgment for the judgment of the person whose life is being lived. This is not a pragmatic claim about governance. It is a metaphysical claim about what human beings are. The political arrangement that honors this claim is the arrangement in which people get to decide their own lives together, through the imperfect and contested process of democratic deliberation, because there is no superior standpoint from which the decision could be made for them.

This picture is not obvious. It has not always been held. It was won, in the West, through a long and bloody struggle against the competing picture — the picture in which some people have access to a superior standpoint, and those people’s judgments should therefore prevail. The struggle produced the specific achievement we call liberal democracy: a political arrangement that treats every consciousness as sovereign over itself, that institutionalizes the refusal of any elite to occupy the superior standpoint, and that builds into its own structure the revisability that consciousness, being fallible, requires. This achievement is fragile. It is newer than most of human history. It is under sustained attack from ideologies that never accepted it and from oligarchic interests that find its constraints inconvenient. But it is, when it works, the political form most adequate to what conscious beings actually are.

The life that becomes available under this arrangement is a specific kind of life. It is a life in which the person gets to author their own meaning — to choose their work, their loves, their faith or absence of faith, their ways of being in the world, within a framework that protects their capacity to make these choices and protects others’ capacity to make theirs. It is a life in which the public sphere is not a competition among tribes for dominance but a conversation among citizens about what we, together, think we owe each other. It is a life in which the weight of tradition is real but not final, in which the past is honored but not imposed, in which the future is open because we, the people living now, are the ones who will make it.

This is beautiful. I mean that word precisely. The arrangement under which human beings get to be the authors of their own lives, in a polity constituted by their own ongoing consent, is beautiful in the specific sense that it matches what human beings are to how human beings should be able to live. It is not a utilitarian calculation about outcomes. It is a vision of human flourishing. The reactionary alternative — hierarchy, submission, order imposed from above, tradition as constraint rather than inheritance, identity as fate rather than undertaking — is offering something smaller. The liberal vision, properly articulated, is larger. It is more demanding. It asks more of the person living it. And it is worth what it asks.

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Why this register has been surrendered.

I want to be honest about why the positive register has atrophied, because the diagnosis is part of the recovery.

One reason is that the register was claimed, for a long time, by people who used it poorly. Cold War liberalism produced a lot of positive-case writing that was self-congratulatory, historically selective, and insufficiently honest about the failures of the arrangements it celebrated. The generation that came of age after Vietnam and the civil rights struggles learned, correctly, to be skeptical of the easy liberal triumphalism that had preceded them. But the correction overshot. The skepticism of the bad positive case became a skepticism of the positive case as such, and the register itself was abandoned to people who would use it badly. This was a mistake. The register can be used well. The tradition contains resources — Lincoln, Douglass, Baldwin, Arendt, the Niebuhrs, Rawls at his best — that show what the register looks like when it is used honestly. Those resources have not been drawn on sufficiently.

Another reason is that the positive register requires a kind of metaphysical seriousness that the academic and journalistic institutions of liberal intellectual life have become uncomfortable with. To make the full positive case, you have to say what human beings are. You have to stake a claim about consciousness, about meaning, about dignity, about what makes a life a life rather than an optimization target. The reactionary writers are willing to stake these claims — badly, usually, but willing. Liberal writers have been trained to treat such claims as philosophically embarrassing, as outside the permitted register of serious analysis. This is a mistake. The claims are unavoidable. Anyone arguing for a political arrangement is implicitly staking a view of what human beings are. The question is only whether you stake the view honestly or pretend you have not staked it. The reactionaries are pretending less. This is part of why they are being heard.

A third reason is that the positive register requires a tolerance for the mythopoetic that the contemporary liberal intellectual class has largely lost. Myth, story, aesthetic weight, the specific language of meaning — these are the vehicles through which the positive case reaches the reader at the level the reader actually lives in. The reactionaries have claimed this territory almost by default, because the liberal writers would not claim it. The Lord of the Rings is not an inherently reactionary text. It is a text about the fight to preserve the small, the beloved, the particular against the will to power that would consume it — which is, at its heart, a liberal vision. But the reactionaries have been willing to invoke Tolkien and the liberals, in the main, have not, which is how the reactionaries have come to be perceived as the party of meaning and the liberals as the party of procedural objection.

This is recoverable. The mythopoetic register is available to anyone willing to use it. The traditions liberal intellectuals could draw on — the civic republican tradition, the abolitionist tradition, the labor tradition, the American founding understood generously rather than skeptically, the long history of people who built the specific institutions we are trying to preserve and who bled to build them — are rich with the kind of material the positive case requires. The material has to be taken up. It will not be taken up by writers who have been trained to treat such material as naive.

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What the recovery looks like.

I am not interested in prescribing what other writers should do. I am interested in describing what the work I am trying to do is, and in naming the absence of this kind of work in the broader ecosystem, so that other writers who want to do it will recognize that there is a space for it and that the space is not being filled.

The work I am trying to do at Notes from the Circus is the positive case, rendered in whatever register the specific piece requires. The philosophical essays ground the case in a picture of reality. The Crisis Papers extend the case into the present moment, defending it against the reactionary mobilization while simultaneously making the positive argument that the defense is for. The mythopoetic pieces do the work of reaching readers at the level where political meaning actually happens. The meditations, the cultural essays, the engagements with figures like Springsteen and Bowie and Baldwin and Watts and Tolkien, are attempts to recover the aesthetic register of the liberal tradition and put it back into service. These are not separate projects. They are a single project, in multiple modes, because the construction of a positive vision requires all of the modes.

The work is not finished. It will not be finished. The positive case is a permanent civic labor, not a destination. Every generation has to make it again for the conditions of its own moment. The labor that has been neglected for a generation has to be resumed.

I am resuming it. I do not think I am alone in doing so. There are other writers — I will not list them, because the list would be incomplete and would do the listed writers a disservice by conscripting them into a project they have not themselves named — who are doing versions of this work from their own angles. The positive case is there to be made. The readers who want it are there to receive it. The ecosystem that has forgotten how to make it is not the whole of what liberal intellectual work can be.

If the reactionaries are the party of meaning in this moment, it is because the liberals have let them be. That is a failure of practice, not a failure of the tradition. The tradition is enormous. The tradition contains everything required for the full positive case to be made. What is needed is writers willing to make it.

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Liberty is not an arrangement we defend. It is an inheritance we are either worthy of or not. The question for our generation is not whether the defensive arguments will hold — they may, they may not, the contest will be decided by forces larger than our writing. The question is whether the thing being defended will still be understood, by those defending it, as the thing it is. Whether we still know what liberty is for. Whether we still feel the weight of what our ancestors built and bled for, and whether we can transmit that weight to the children who will inherit whatever is left when this moment passes.

This is the transmission that has been failing. The defensive work, however skilled, does not perform the transmission. What gets transmitted through sharp critique of the reactionary right is a list of things not to be. What does not get transmitted is what to be, what to want, what to build, what kind of human life to aspire to under what kind of political order. Without the transmission, the tradition becomes a set of procedural reflexes without a soul. And a tradition without a soul does not survive contact with a tradition that has one, however ugly that other tradition’s soul may be.

The reactionaries have a soul. It is a cramped and frightened and hierarchical soul, and it is wrong about almost everything that matters, but it is a soul, and it is animating its bearers with the specific energy that only a positive vision can animate a person with. The liberals have, for a generation, assumed that the soul was obvious and therefore did not need to be articulated. This was a catastrophic assumption. Nothing about the soul is obvious. The soul has to be articulated in every generation, by the writers who have taken on the civic labor of that articulation, or the soul does not survive the generation.

I am trying to articulate the soul. Not the arrangement, not the procedures, not the policy consequences — the soul. The thing liberty is for. The thing democracy honors. The picture of human life that the American experiment, at its highest moments, was attempting to make possible. The contemplative ground under the creative act, the specific beloved thing that the field is fought for, the dignity of consciousness governing itself inside the only reality there is.

Liberty is compelling. Democracy is dignified. The human life that becomes available under their protection is a life worth wanting, worth building, worth defending at whatever cost defending it exacts. These are not concessions to sentimentality. They are the foundation of the argument. They are the thing the argument is for.

The positive case has been rusty for a long time. It is time to take it out, clean it up, and put it back to work.

That is what I am trying to do here. It is what others should be doing, from their own angles and in their own voices. And it is what the tradition, if it is to survive this moment, requires of the those who claim to be its inheritors.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I look at the Eastern tradition, and I say: I think you are right about the nature of this existence.

I feel the pull. The quiet release. The surrender of the grasping self into the unfolding that was already happening before I arrived and will keep unfolding after I am gone. I feel how real it is. How beautiful. How available. The contemplative ground is not wrong. The non-grasping is not escapism. The peace that is there when the ego lets go of the fight is a real peace, and the tradition that has been naming it for twenty-five hundred years is not mistaken about what it has named.

I grant it. I feel it. I do not dismiss it.

And then I look out across the field.

I see Sauron’s armies. I see the fortress. I see the ground between me and them. I understand what this moment requires, and I understand that the contemplative release, however beautiful, is not the whole of what is asked of me now.

Because there is a hobbit walking into Mordor with the Ring. Because there is a Shire that would be lost if the fortress holds. Because there is a specific, small, vulnerable, beloved thing that the war is for, and it cannot defend itself, and the pull of peace is real but so is the hobbit, and between the two I have to choose.

I raise my sword.

Not because the tradition was wrong. Not because the release was a lie. Not because the quiet was unavailable. I could have walked into the forest. I could have sat down by the river. I could have let go.

I raise my sword because Frodo is real. Because the Shire is real. Because the armies are real. Because in the field where the armies are massing, consciousness is asked to do something the ontology makes possible but does not perform on its own. It is asked to create. To build. To defend. To bring forth the revolt against the absurd that Camus named — not because the universe demands it, but because I do. Because the making is the thing consciousness does when it chooses to do it, and the choosing is what I am for.

The release is real. And I decline it.

I raise my sword. For Frodo. For the Shire. For the small and vulnerable and beloved thing that would be lost if I walked into the forest instead.

I understand. And I raise the sword anyway.

That is what it means to be here, in this field, with the armies massing, and the Ring on its way to Mordor, and the choice still mine to make.

For Frodo.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I am going to say two things that sound contradictory and are not.

The first is that AI is the future. Large language models are the most significant advance in the history of software, and the industry has not yet absorbed what that means. The second is that the current AI buildout is a bubble — not because the technology is overhyped, but because the capital being deployed is massively misaligned with where the technology is actually going. Both claims are true simultaneously. That simultaneity is what neither Wall Street nor the hyperscaler executives are prepared to face, because the implication is that the entire cloud-software business model of the last fifteen years is about to be dismantled by the technology the same industry is pouring trillions into building.

I made the technical and philosophical case against the scaling-to-AGI thesis at length in Why I’m Betting Against the AGI Hype — the compound probability analysis, the architectural barriers, the category error at the heart of the AGI project. That piece is the foundation of the argument I’m making here. I won’t rehearse it in full. The relevant conclusion for this essay is narrower: the scaling paradigm is not going to deliver the transformations its current valuations require, and the capital allocation built on the assumption that it will is historically misaligned.

I want to explain why I think this. I am not a detached observer. I spent a career in the technology industry, I have built software at scale, and I use these tools daily — I have several Claude Code projects running right now. I know what these models are capable of. I also know what they are not. And when I look at what they are, and where they are going, and then I look at the investment thesis that is supposedly supporting the valuations, the gap between the two is the biggest mispricing I have seen in my professional lifetime.

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What LLMs actually do to software.

Start with what has already happened, because the industry has been remarkably reluctant to describe it plainly. Large language models, when properly deployed by a competent engineer, collapse the cost of producing custom software by at least an order of magnitude. I am not speculating about this. I am reporting it from the inside. Tasks that used to require a six-month engagement with a development team can now be done, by one engineer with a good model and clear specifications, in a week. Sometimes in a day. Sometimes in an afternoon.

This is not a claim about the models being smart. It is a claim about the economics of software production. Large language models — as I argued in LLMs Are Universal Translators, Not Universal Thinkers — are translation engines. They translate between symbol systems. They translate business requirements into code. They translate specifications into implementations. They translate natural language descriptions of workflows into the software that executes those workflows. That translation function, applied to software production, is what collapses the economics of custom software. The cost of a line of working code has collapsed. The cost of translating a business requirement into a functioning system has collapsed. The cost of integrating two systems that were not previously integrated has collapsed. The cost of producing a reasonable UI on top of a reasonable database has collapsed. All of the tasks that made enterprise software expensive to build — the reason companies paid Salesforce forty thousand dollars a seat per year instead of building their own CRM — are tasks the models now do for the engineer in real time.

Think about what this means for the software-as-a-service business model. SaaS exists because, historically, the cost of building and maintaining bespoke software was higher than the cost of renting generic software from a vendor. You paid Salesforce because building what Salesforce does was more expensive than paying Salesforce to do it. You paid ServiceNow because standing up your own ticketing and workflow system would have taken a team of engineers a year and you could rent ServiceNow in a week. You paid Workday, Zendesk, HubSpot, Monday, Atlassian, and the hundred other SaaS tools in the average enterprise stack for the same reason. The generic product, however imperfect, was cheaper than bespoke.

That equation is in the process of inverting.

Consultancies are already figuring this out. A mid-sized consultancy with a team of competent engineers using modern tooling can now build a company a custom CRM that fits that company’s actual workflow — not a generic CRM configured into a shape that approximates their workflow — for less than three years of Salesforce licensing fees. And the custom CRM runs on the company’s own infrastructure, does not charge per seat, does not extract telemetry for training on competitors, does not impose an upgrade cycle, does not get worse when the vendor decides to reorient its roadmap around a new executive’s priorities, and can be modified at any time by anyone with the model access to modify it. The economics are not close. They are not going to be close. They are going to diverge further as the tooling improves, which it is doing on a timescale of months.

Enterprise SaaS is going to experience what the record industry experienced when MP3s got compressed enough to download. Except the SaaS companies are, in many cases, larger than the record labels were, and the dependence on their products is deeper, and the customer lock-in is stronger — which means the reckoning will take longer to arrive and will be more violent when it does.

Where inference is going.

The second piece of the mispricing is the assumption that large-scale language model inference will continue to run in hyperscaler data centers forever, consuming the electricity and renting the compute that justifies the current capital expenditure on GPU buildouts. This assumption is not going to hold, and anyone paying attention to the hardware roadmap already knows it.

Watch what Apple is doing. The Neural Engine in Apple Silicon has been quietly accumulating capability for years. The A-series and M-series chips have been engineered specifically to run transformer models efficiently on-device. The combination of algorithmic improvements — quantization, distillation, sparse attention, mixture-of-experts architectures — and hardware acceleration on custom silicon is making local inference viable for models that, two years ago, required a cluster of H100s to serve. Within the next several iterations of the hardware — I am not making a ten-year prediction, I am making a short-horizon prediction — Apple will be running a local Siri on your phone that is as capable as ChatGPT or Claude is today. For free. Without sending your queries to a server. Without training on your data. Without rate limits. Without surveillance.

And Apple will do this not because they are benevolent but because they have figured out that local inference is an enormous competitive advantage against Google and Microsoft, both of whom depend on cloud-based AI for revenue and would be structurally incapable of matching a local-first offering even if they wanted to.

Once the local version is good enough — and “good enough” is a rapidly moving target that the local side is catching up to faster than the cloud side is improving — the economics of cloud inference collapse for a large class of consumer use cases. Why would anyone pay for a subscription to a chatbot when their phone has one that is equivalent and free and private? The cloud providers will still have a market — for frontier-model research, for specialized enterprise applications, for use cases that genuinely require scale — but the mass consumer and small-business market will migrate to local inference, and the revenue models that justified the current GPU buildout assumed that mass consumer and small-business market as the foundation.

The hyperscalers are building data centers to serve a market that will, within a short horizon, have migrated to a substrate they cannot charge for. The capital expenditure is going to produce useful infrastructure — no argument there — but the revenue that was supposed to justify the expenditure is going to be a fraction of what the investment thesis requires.

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Why this is a bubble without being a fraud.

This is the part that is genuinely hard to hold, and the reason most observers are failing to hold it. A bubble does not require the underlying technology to be fake. It requires the capital to be misallocated relative to where the technology’s value will actually land. The dot-com bubble was a bubble despite the internet being real. The railroad bubbles of the nineteenth century were bubbles despite railroads being real. The question is never whether the thing is real. The question is whether the capital deployed into the thing will earn a return commensurate with the capital deployed.

The current AI buildout fails this test not because the technology is a mirage but because the technology is going to do in-situ business model destruction to the companies building it. The value added by LLMs is enormous. The value that will be captured by the companies currently spending hundreds of billions on training runs and data center buildouts is much smaller than the total value added, and in many cases the companies will lose value overall — because the technology they are building is going to destroy the business models of their own other products.

Microsoft is pouring capital into OpenAI while simultaneously presiding over an enterprise software portfolio — including Office, Dynamics, and Azure SaaS services — that AI will cannibalize. The returns from the OpenAI investment would have to exceed the destruction of the rest of the Microsoft portfolio for the capital allocation to be rational. I do not believe they will. I do not think anyone doing the math inside Microsoft believes they will, either. But the alternative is to not invest in AI, and that is not an option any CEO can take, because the short-term market would punish the refusal more severely than the long-term market will punish the miscalibration.

This is a classic bubble dynamic. Every individual actor is responding rationally to their local incentives. The aggregate outcome is irrational. Wall Street is not irrational in some mysterious way — Wall Street is responding to the fact that nobody wants to be the analyst who called the top, and nobody wants to be the portfolio manager who underweighted Nvidia in 2024. The incentives inside financial media are identical. CNBC and Bloomberg are not wrong about the technology. They are structurally incapable of describing a scenario in which the technology is real and the capital is misallocated, because that scenario requires a kind of analytical patience that cable financial news does not reward.

The gap between the two claims — the technology is revolutionary and the capital deployed into the technology will not earn its return — is the gap where most of the money is going to be lost.

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What the industry knows but cannot say.

The thing I want to say, because I have been inside these conversations and I know what is discussed in private versus what is said in public, is that many of the people building the current AI infrastructure know that the economics do not work. They know that SaaS is going to be disrupted by their own technology. They know that local inference is going to eat the consumer market. They know that the capital deployed is not going to earn its return on a cycle that matches the current valuations.

What they cannot say, in public, is what the alternative is. Because there is no obvious pivot from we are building the future of software to we are building infrastructure for a market that will partially disappear by the time the infrastructure is operational. The former supports the stock price. The latter does not. And the executives of these companies are not paid to tell the truth about the market. They are paid to maintain the conditions under which the current valuations are defensible for as long as possible, and then to be gone with their compensation packages intact before the reckoning arrives.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a structural feature of how publicly traded companies behave when their valuations depend on a narrative that insiders have reason to doubt. The narrative is maintained not because anyone is lying but because no one is paid to contradict it, and everyone is paid to extend it. The only people who lose by the extension are the retail investors who bought the story, the employees whose stock options will be worth a fraction of what they were promised, and the communities whose energy infrastructure is being strained to serve an industry that will not be at its current scale in ten years.

The pension funds will take the hit. The 401k plans will take the hit. The municipal bondholders who financed the data center power upgrades will take the hit. The hyperscaler executives will be fine. This is the pattern, and it is the same pattern every bubble produces.

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The revolution inside the bubble.

And here is the thing I want to leave you with, because it is the hardest to hold and the most important. The bubble does not invalidate the revolution. The revolution is real. The technology is going to transform the production of software, the operation of businesses, the texture of everyday digital life. The fact that the current capital allocation is misaligned does not mean the technology is a fraud. It means the market has, as markets do, built the wrong infrastructure for the transformation that is coming.

When the bubble pops, the technology will still be here. The GPUs will still exist. The models will still run. The software produced with them will still work. What will not exist is the specific set of business models that the bubble was built to justify. SaaS will be dismantled. The cloud-inference revenue thesis will be revealed as a transitional artifact. The hyperscaler capex will be marked down. The companies that survive will be the ones that figured out, before the rest, that the value of AI is not captured by controlling the models but by deploying them — at the level of the engineer, the consultancy, the local handset, the specific enterprise workflow.

The future belongs to the people and organizations that understand that AI is not a platform business. It is an infrastructure dissolvent. It dissolves the platforms that used to collect rent on the production of software. And the capital that is currently being deployed to build new platforms on top of AI is making a category error — building fortresses out of the same material that is designed to dissolve fortresses.

The political stakes of this are larger than the financial ones, and I’ve made the case at length in Garbage In, Garbage Out. The philosophical architecture being built around AI — the framing of intelligence as pattern recognition, of governance as optimization, of human judgment as an inferior computational substrate — does not disappear when the bubble pops. The financial reckoning will arrive first. The philosophical reckoning will take longer, and it is the one that matters more. When the GPUs are marked down and the valuations corrected and the hyperscaler earnings revised, the deeper question will remain: what kind of political order did we build while the bubble was inflating, and who gets to dismantle the parts of it that shouldn’t survive?

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What to watch.

If you want to know whether I am right, watch three things.

First, watch consultancy revenue over the next several years. If custom-built enterprise software starts eating into the SaaS revenue curves — if companies start reporting that they are canceling subscriptions and moving to in-house systems built by smaller teams — that is the leading indicator of the model I am describing.

Second, watch Apple‘s on-device AI story. The moment Apple ships a local Siri that matches cloud-based chatbots for the average consumer use case, the cloud-inference consumer revenue thesis dies. It will not happen in one product cycle. It will happen over two or three. And when it happens, the revenue curves for cloud AI services will bend.

Third, watch what the hyperscalers do with their data centers when the AI training demand plateaus. The buildout assumes continuous exponential growth in training compute. When the curve bends — which it will, because there are only so many engineers to train and only so many use cases to serve — the infrastructure will need to find other uses, and the other uses will pay substantially less than the training demand was paying.

The reckoning will not arrive dramatically. It will arrive quarterly, in earnings reports that slightly underperform expectations, in revised guidance that explains away the shortfall, in write-downs that are framed as strategic realignments. It will arrive the way all bubble reckonings arrive: in the gap between the story the industry told itself and the revenue the industry actually produced. The story was always too big for the revenue to catch up. The revenue is what the market eventually prices on.

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AI is the future. The current AI buildout is a bubble. Both are true. The industry cannot say the second part out loud because the current valuations depend on pretending it is not true. Wall Street is cheering the buildout because Wall Street is paid to cheer the buildout. Financial media is narrating the story because narrating the story is their job. None of these actors are lying. They are performing the roles their incentives assign them.

The question for anyone trying to understand what is actually happening — as an investor, as a technologist, as a citizen, as a participant in the broader economy — is whether you can hold the two claims at once. The technology is real and the capital is misaligned. The revolution is coming and the revolution will destroy the business models of the companies currently being valued on the assumption that they will capture it.

This is what a technological revolution looks like from inside the bubble that accompanies it. The bubble will pop. The technology will remain. The people who understood the difference will be the ones who built what comes next.

The capital is misaligned. The technology is not.

Go Deeper into the Circus

The dominant story about Jeffrey Epstein is a story about blackmail. It is a satisfying story because it implies conspiracy — a small number of bad actors, compromising tapes, a shared criminality binding the network together. If the blackmail story is true, then the problem is discrete. Find the tapes. Find the actors. Prosecute. The rest of us, and the institutions we live inside, are not implicated.

The story I want to tell is harder. It is also, I think, the true one.

Epstein’s primary function was not blackmail. His primary function was connection. He was a super-networker — what the social scientists would call a hub node in a scale-free network — and the power he exercised over the lives of the people in his orbit was not primarily the power of compromising information but the power of being the person you needed to get to the other people you needed. He remembered your birthday. He had coffee with you when he was in town. He hosted dinners where finance met science met politics met royalty. He made warm introductions and put in a good word for your idea with someone who could fund it. He was the person you called when you wanted to be in touch with the person you could not reach directly.

People like this exist in every stratum of social life. They exist in labor unions and in international human rights organizations, in political parties and in academic disciplines, in Hollywood and in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. If you have worked in any senior capacity inside any institution, you have met at least one. They are, often, genuinely useful. They lubricate the machinery of collective life by making the introductions that make the work possible. They are a recognizable and often admirable social type.

Epstein performed this function at the highest stratum of global power. Almost none of the people who sought to be close to him were seeking to participate in the abuse of young women. They were seeking what everyone in his orbit was seeking: access to the other powerful people he could introduce them to. They wanted the meeting with the Gates Foundation, the phone call with the prime minister, the dinner with the Nobel laureate, the conversation with the JPMorgan executive who could make them a client, the introduction to the venture capitalist, the invitation to the island where the other serious people gathered.

What made Epstein valuable was not information he had gathered about these people. What made him valuable was the people themselves — and the fact that, once a certain threshold of density was reached, the value of being connected to him grew with every new connection already inside his network. Each introduction made the next one cheaper to acquire. This is what network scientists mean by preferential attachment: new nodes in a growing network connect disproportionately to the most-connected existing nodes, which amplifies the connectivity of those nodes further, which attracts more new connections, and so on, in a self-reinforcing cascade. Epstein understood this mechanism intuitively — perhaps more clearly than most of the people he connected — and built a life around exploiting it.

I want to spend the remainder of this essay on three questions. First, what does the evidence actually show about how this function operated? Second, how does Epstein differ from the countless other super-networkers who perform the same function without the criminal substrate? Third — and this is the question that matters most for anyone trying to understand why the pattern produced what it produced — what does it mean to say that the moral blindness around Epstein was structural rather than conspiratorial, and what does that framing require of us?

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In a few conversations recently, I’ve surprised people by saying that American democracy today might actually be stronger than it’s been in a long time. Which is a pretty counter-intuitive thing for me to say, given the fact that I spend most of my writing hours documenting a fascist executive, a compliant Congress, and captured courts.

What I mean when I say our democracy is stronger is not that the machinery of our government is in better shape. It isn’t. And it’s getting worse by the day. The machinery I’ve documented in these dispatches is being dismantled in real time, and nothing in what follows should be read as a retreat from that analysis.

What I mean is the people and the culture.

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Americans across the political spectrum are awakening to the dangers around them, and are coming to understand the nature of their political crisis. And it is in that awakening that a healthier democratic culture is arising.

Democracy is a practice as much as it is a system.

When I see the No Kings protests, the new wave of younger establishment-breaking politicians, and an increasing political solidarity for the American system — when I see liberals waving American flags at protests, something that was dismissed as jingoistic and right-coded not long ago — I think I am witnessing the formation of a stronger democratic culture. And democratic culture is democracy as much as the institutions are democracy.

The flag reclamation is worth its own beat. For years, a segment of the American left treated the flag as the property of the people most willing to betray what the flag actually represents. What is happening now is the refusal to cede that symbol. The people showing up in the streets are saying — with their bodies, with the cloth — that the republic is not the property of the people currently dismantling it. That the symbols of self-governance belong to the people practicing self-governance. This is a significant cultural development and it has happened faster than most observers have noticed.

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This doesn’t mean there isn’t a hard road ahead. It doesn’t make our government any less captured by fascist elements. But it does mean this: democracy lives. In the streets. And in our minds. And between each other as a solidarity that supervenes above it all.

The People. They are the sovereign of our republic. And when I look across this country today, I am beginning to see a recognition of that emerging. A recognition that people need to organize, that they need to speak out, that they need to push back against the great civilizational crime being committed before us.

That is democracy.

What I am doing right now is democracy. That you are reading this is democracy. And in that sense of democracy, American democracy has begun to strengthen. A common recognition has taken hold.

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Some will call this populism. The powers that be see it differently, of course. They wish to scare us back into our homes with their masked thugs. But we are not afraid. Many of us are not afraid, anyway. And a whole new generation of Americans is stepping up to the plate, demanding representation.

This is democracy. This is how it works.

It has not died. It lives and it breathes and its light cannot be extinguished.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I’ve come to hate the internet. I mean, not in the sense that I want to destroy it. I recognize our collective life depends on it, and that it has made our lives better in many ways. So when I say I hate it, I hate it in the same way that I hate a lot of things in life that I understand are necessary and so I’ll just go along with it.

I spend a lot of time on the internet. It is how I do what I’m doing right now, which is writing this meditation into the internet. And there’s something about it that I hate. I guess I’m saying I’d prefer in some sense that I wasn’t doing this at all. Because in my own little utopia of my own dreams, I would not be doing what I’m doing now. A lot of what I’m doing in my daily life, and including writing these words down, is out of a sense of moral obligation. I feel like I have some obligation to try to make the world a better place than it is, because I recognize danger, and I recognize that if people don’t awaken themselves to these dangers, a future for our children could be lost. And when I’m at my most honest, the people who are close to me, who see me in my more vulnerable moments, know and understand that I’m focused on what I am for one reason: I love this country and I care about my children’s future. That’s my motivation.

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I left my career in technology. The truth is, I love technology. I really do. But I feel like the things I like about technology — and have always loved about technology — are different now than what these large corporate behemoths that own most of our online life like about technology. What they like about technology is that it can be used to control, to capture your attention, and to extract as much money from you as they can.

I’ve written about Steve Jobs before here on Notes from the Circus, and I’ve also spoken about him in some of my video content. I’ve studied the man as much as anyone can from the public source material because he always fascinated me. He fascinated me because he had a philosophy about life and about technology. When you would watch Steve Jobs talk about the products he built and designed, he was always talking in terms of the creativity and human expression that these products could unlock. It’s why artists, musicians, and creative types fell in love with Apple, even as the rest of the business world saw Apple as overpriced and underpowered compared to the PC.

Steve wasn’t a geek. That was Steve Wozniak. People say he was the sales guy. But that’s not right. He was the guy who understood that technology is a tool for humans. That it’s not an ends. That we don’t live for technology or in technology. And he saw the world that way. To a fault. It got him fired from the company he co-founded.

I am writing this on a Mac. Which is running the latest version of macOS, which was considered a brand new operating system in 2000 when Mac OS X was announced to replace the technologically outdated MacOS of the time — which really was inferior to Windows at that point. But the interesting thing is that it wasn’t a new operating system at all. It was eleven years old. It was NeXTSTEP, which Apple had acquired. It was the company that Steve founded after being fired from Apple in the early 1980s. NeXTSTEP was the OS on which Tim Berners-Lee developed the world’s first web browser.

Modern macOS’s lineage dates back to the late 1980s, and much of the basic architecture of the operating system remains unchanged to this day, over thirty years.

The reason I went down this cul-de-sac was for a purpose. Because the fact that the legacy of Steve Jobs’ obsessive focus on creating human-focused technology, and the decisions he made with a small team of engineers in the 1980s, still constitute the foundations of the technology that powers Apple products today, is pretty impressive. It says something about Jobs’ instincts. He’s perhaps under-appreciated for his brilliance by many who think he was just a gifted marketer. No, Jobs understood technology. In some ways more deeply than the programmers he employed.

Enabling human creativity. Creating something new. Giving people tools to let them create things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to create.

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The thing is, I don’t think technology has to be alienating. I don’t think it has to make us mad and afraid. I don’t think we have to live like this.

It is not an accident that no one like Jobs occupies a position of comparable influence today. The business model that dominates the industry cannot tolerate such a person. A designer who genuinely believes technology is a tool for humans would build products that release users rather than capture them. Products that release users do not maximize attention. Products that do not maximize attention do not maximize revenue. Products that do not maximize revenue do not get built at scale. The model selects against the sensibility. Which is to say: the absence of Jobs’s philosophy from the commanding heights of technology is not a vacancy waiting to be filled. It is a feature of the system as currently constituted.

As long as the most profitable businesses in the world make money by making us mad and afraid, so that we give them more of our attention, so they can convince us to buy more things, our world is going to keep getting more and more miserable. Because we have an extractive set of businesses in Silicon Valley — not all of them, but the big ones — whose entire model is getting your attention. Keeping your attention. And then trying to own your whole life.

This is actually Elon Musk’s explicit strategy with X. He wants it to be the “everything app” — where you conduct your entire life, including your finances.

This is, upon reflection, the most fraudulent kind of economic capture that one could imagine constructing. Because it is not a business, if it owns your attention, your finances, your communications, and your sense of reality. It is a system that owns you.

And I think such business models should, when you really think about it, be illegal. That is, if we value our own collective mental health.

Go Deeper into the Circus

Matt Taibbi thinks Eric Swalwell’s resignation is a due process problem. He wrote a piece this week arguing that forcing politicians out of office over allegations — before a jury has weighed in — amounts to “public stoning.” The framing is familiar. It is also wrong. Not because due process doesn’t matter. It does. But because Taibbi is answering a question nobody asked, in order to avoid the question that was actually posed.

The question is not: should Eric Swalwell be punished before he is convicted?

The question is: what does a person owe to the people whose trust they hold?

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There is a concept in public life that has almost entirely disappeared, and its disappearance explains more about the current crisis than most of the things we spend our time arguing about. The concept is this: the seat does not belong to you.

If you hold public office, the authority you exercise belongs to the people who granted it. If you sit in the C-suite, the fiduciary duty you carry belongs to the shareholders, the employees, the customers whose lives are entangled with the institution you lead. If you command a military unit, the loyalty you receive is owed to the mission and the people who serve under you. In every case, the position exists to serve interests that are not your own. You are a steward. You were entrusted with something. The moment your presence in the seat becomes a distraction from the purpose of the seat, you have an obligation to leave it.

This is not punishment. It is the basic condition of the job.

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The Romans had a word for this. They actually had a man for it. Cincinnatus was a farmer who was granted dictatorial power to defend the republic, won the war in sixteen days, and went home. He did not stay to enjoy the authority. He did not argue that the people owed him the position because he had earned it. He understood that the power had been granted for a purpose, and when the purpose was fulfilled, the power was no longer his. Washington modeled his own departure on Cincinnatus — and the voluntary relinquishment of power at the end of his second term was, more than any battle, the act that made the American republic possible. It told every future president: the office is not yours. You hold it in trust. You give it back.

Even Richard Nixon understood this. The man was a crook, a paranoiac, and a liar. He debased the office in ways that seemed unimaginable at the time. And when the walls closed in, he resigned. Not because he was noble. Because even Nixon — Nixon — understood that the presidency was bigger than the president. That a leader who turns the office into a stage for his own survival has already forfeited the authority the office confers.

That was the floor. We are now below it.

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Taibbi’s error, and it is an error shared by an entire cottage industry of writers who built their brands as counter-warriors to the #MeToo movement, is a category mistake. They treat resignation as though it exists on the same continuum as criminal conviction — as though leaving office is a penalty that requires the same evidentiary standard as a prison sentence. It does not. These are different institutions answering different questions. The court asks: did this person commit a crime, and can it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt? The office asks: can this person continue to serve the interests they were entrusted to protect?

A politician embroiled in public scandal is not effectively representing the people who elected them. A CEO at the center of a months-long media firestorm is not effectively leading the company. A university president who has become the story is not effectively running the university. This is true whether the allegations are proven, unproven, or even false. The distraction is the point. The inability to fulfill the purpose of the seat is the point. The seat was never about you.

If you are falsely accused, and the accusation becomes an unmanageable public spectacle, this is of course unfair to you. Genuinely, humanly unfair. And you have remedies for that unfairness. You have defamation suits. You have civil courts. You have a legal system designed to adjudicate exactly this kind of injury. What you do not have is the right to hold the seat hostage while you fight your personal battle, consuming the attention and resources and institutional credibility that belong to the people the seat was built to serve.

That is what lawsuits are for. That is what courts are for. And a leader who cannot distinguish between their personal interest in vindication and their institutional obligation to the people they serve is no leader at all.

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The Taibbi school treats this as an argument about individual rights versus mob justice. It is not. It is an argument about what leadership means. And what leadership means — what it has always meant, from Cincinnatus to Washington to every functional democracy that has ever existed — is that the person in the seat accepts a set of obligations that supersede their own interests. The willingness to leave is not a concession to the mob. It is the foundational act of republican self-governance. It is what distinguishes a steward from a king.

The refusal to leave — the insistence that the seat is yours, that your accusers must be defeated before you will consider vacating, that the institution must absorb the cost of your personal drama indefinitely — is the feudal claim dressed in the language of civil liberties. It says: I possess this office. It is mine. You cannot take it from me without proving, to my satisfaction, that I have forfeited it. That is not due process. That is lordship.

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The #MeToo backlash industry has made a lucrative franchise out of collapsing these categories. The argument always takes the same form: an allegation is made, a resignation follows, and a commentator declares that the absence of a criminal trial means justice was not served. But the commentator has smuggled in an assumption that does all the work — the assumption that the only legitimate consequence for a person in power is a consequence imposed by a court. Everything else is a mob. Everything else is hysteria. Everything else is a “public stoning.”

This is flatly ahistorical. For most of the history of democratic governance, leaders resigned when their continued presence in office became untenable — not because a court ordered them to, but because they understood that the office demanded it. The norm of resignation was not an artifact of mob rule. It was an artifact of a shared understanding that public trust imposes obligations on the people who hold it. The collapse of that norm is not a victory for due process. It is the disappearance of an entire category of civic obligation, replaced by a possessive theory of office that owes more to feudalism than to liberalism.

Taibbi, to his credit, is at least consistent. He genuinely believes the individual’s right to hold power should not be abrogated without formal legal proceedings. But consistency is not the same as correctness. And the world his framework produces — a world in which no leader ever resigns, in which every scandal becomes a siege, in which the institution absorbs unlimited damage while the officeholder fights for personal survival — is not a world with more justice in it. It is a world in which the concept of public trust has been fully privatized, and the seat belongs to whoever can hold it longest.

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A leader who is falsely accused and resigns has been treated unjustly. I want to be clear about that. The injustice is real. But the injustice is to the person — and the person has legal remedies available to them as a person. The seat is not a legal remedy. The seat is not a shield. The seat is not yours. It belongs to the people you were asked to serve, and when you can no longer serve them — for whatever reason, just or unjust — the mature act is to give it back.

People used to understand this. Leaders used to resign not because they were forced to, but because they recognized that the cost of staying exceeded the cost of leaving — not to themselves, but to everyone else. That recognition is what maturity in leadership looks like. It is what distinguishes service from possession. It is the difference between holding an office and owning one.

A leader who cannot see this distinction is no leader at all.

It’s not about you.

Go Deeper into the Circus

I want to make an argument that will make some people uncomfortable. Not because it is radical. Because it is obvious, and the obvious thing has not been said plainly enough.

The Republican Party is the Confederate Party.

Not metaphorically. Not as a rhetorical flourish. As a structural description of what the party is doing, who it is serving, and what historical project it has aligned itself with. The evidence is not ambiguous. It is on the record, in the executive orders, in the base names, in the statues, in the pardons, in the theory of demographic replacement that now constitutes mainstream Republican ideology.

But before we get to the monuments, I need to tell you about New Mexico.

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Steven Garcia was 48 years old. On August 28, 2025, he walked out of his home in Albuquerque in a green camouflage shirt and shorts, carrying only a handgun. He left behind his phone, his keys, his wallet, his car. He has not been seen since.

Garcia was a government contractor at the Kansas City National Security Campus facility in Albuquerque. The KCNSC manufactures more than 80 percent of all non-nuclear components for America’s nuclear weapons arsenal. He held a top security clearance in what a source described as a “very high-level, overseeing position for all the assets — tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and assets, some of which are classified.” The source described him as “a very stable person” and said foreign espionage “makes the most sense.”

Garcia is the tenth person connected to American nuclear and space secrets to die or disappear since mid-2023.

The others: Anthony Chavez, retired Los Alamos National Laboratory worker, vanished May 2025. Melissa Casias, active administrative assistant at LANL with top security clearance, vanished June 2025. William Neil McCasland, retired Major General and former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory — who oversaw the Air Force’s $2.2 billion science and technology program — walked out of his Albuquerque home on February 27, 2026 without his phone, wearable devices, or prescription glasses. Not seen since. Nuno Loureiro, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and reportedly on the verge of a breakthrough in fusion energy, was assassinated at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 15, 2025. Carl Grillmair, NASA JPL astrophysicist connected to missile tracking technology used by the Air Force, was shot and killed on his front porch at 6 AM on February 16, 2026.

Four of the ten vanished from the New Mexico nuclear corridor — Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos, the KCNSC — in identical fashion: on foot, personal effects behind, no body. All four linked through overlapping facilities. All four disappeared during the same window of time.

Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker said publicly: “Our scientists have been targeted for a long time, especially in the rocket propulsion area, by hostile foreign intelligence services. I think we’ve even seen instances where nuclear scientists have been taken out. They’ve been assassinated.”

The White House Press Secretary was asked about this pattern yesterday. She promised to look into it.

Here is what was happening at the FBI during the same period.

25% of all FBI agents — approximately 3,000 of 13,000 — were reassigned to immigration enforcement. In the 25 largest field offices, up to 45% of agents were diverted. The DOJ’s counterintelligence and export control section — the division specifically responsible for tracking foreign espionage on American soil — lost a third of its personnel. A total of 6,700 federal law enforcement officers were pulled from existing assignments across the DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, IRS, Diplomatic Security Service, and Homeland Security Investigations.

Supervisors were told to avoid leaving a paper trail documenting the shift away from national security priorities.

Iranian oil trafficking investigations were delayed for months because agents had been pulled to deportation duty — investigations directly relevant to the Iran war now being fought. Child exploitation investigators were reassigned. Coast Guard aircraft were diverted to move immigrants between detention facilities. An emergency partial reversal occurred in June 2025 — the FBI moved some agents back to counterterrorism because of Iran retaliation threats. The counterintelligence section remains depleted.

The KCNSC manufactures 80% of America’s nuclear weapons components. The FBI’s counterintelligence division was gutted. Ten people connected to nuclear and space secrets died or vanished. The White House will look into it.

This is the national security consequence of the immigration enforcement priority. Not abstract. Not theoretical. Measured in missing people, in assassinations on front porches, in generals walking into the desert without their glasses, in the most important nuclear facility in the country operating with a depleted intelligence apparatus while a hostile foreign power — we are currently fighting a war with Iran — operates freely in the gaps.

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The Republican Party leadership and the people around Trump do not view foreign authoritarians as adversaries. They view them as allies. This is the only explanation that makes the pattern coherent. The abandonment of NATO allies. The embrace of Orbán — until the Hungarian people voted him out in a landslide. The celebration of FBI agents being retasked from counterintelligence to immigration enforcement, cheered by the conservative movement as a victory while foreign agents operated freely in the New Mexico nuclear corridor. And now, ten nuclear scientists dead or disappeared, almost certainly by foreign actors who have been given a wide berth to operate inside a country whose counterintelligence apparatus was deliberately dismantled in service of the demographic project.

This is not incompetence. Incompetence does not produce this level of consistency. This is alignment.

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While this was happening, the Trump administration reinstalled a monument to Albert Pike at Judiciary Square in Washington D.C. — steps from federal courthouses. Pike was a slave owner, a white supremacist, and a Confederate general. The statue had been torn down during the 2020 racial justice protests. The executive order mandating its restoration was titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

In June 2025, the Army reversed the Biden-era renaming of military bases that had honored Eisenhower, African American soldiers, and women. Fort Bragg — named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg — was restored. Fort Liberty was eliminated. Fort Benning — named for Confederate General Henry Benning, an avowed white supremacist who explicitly argued that secession was necessary to preserve slavery — was restored. Trump at the ceremony: “We won many battles from those forts. Now is not the time for change.”

Defense Secretary Hegseth personally announced the restoration of a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery — the nation’s most sacred military ground, where the bodies of Americans who died fighting for the United States are buried.

These are not symbolic gestures. They are declarations. They tell you, in the clearest available language, whose memory this administration is organized to honor and whose it is organized to erase.

⁂

Trump pardoned over 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists. This is the third mass pardon of insurrectionists in American history. The first two were Andrew Johnson’s pardons of Confederates between 1865 and 1868, and Ulysses Grant’s pardons of Klan members in 1873.

History records what followed. Johnson’s pardons allowed Confederate generals to be elected to Congress within months of the insurrection’s defeat. Grant’s pardons emboldened the Klan. A federal prosecutor wrote Grant that trying Klansmen and then pardoning them had empowered the “hide monster.” Years of violent racial terror followed both rounds of pardons.

Pardoning insurrectionists is a specific political technology. It signals to the people who committed political violence on your behalf that the violence was legitimate, that they will be protected, and that more of it is both permitted and welcome.

⁂

The intellectual architecture of the modern Republican Party is built on replacement theory — the belief that the white majority is under coordinated attack by Democrats who are importing a new electorate to replace the existing one.

JD Vance, before becoming Vice President, accused Democrats of “trying to transform the electorate” by bringing “a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” Elise Stefanik, now United Nations Ambassador, ran Facebook ads claiming Democrats were planning a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting amnesty to immigrants who would “overthrow our current electorate.” Tucker Carlson spent five years and over 400 segments on the same theme.

An AP-NORC poll found that one in three Americans now believes there is a coordinated effort to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral purposes. Among Republicans, the number is 47%.

This is not a fringe position. It is the party’s organizing theory of politics. And it is the same theory that animated the Confederacy — the belief that the white majority must be protected from demographic and political change, at whatever cost to the constitutional order.

The immigration enforcement priority is not a border security policy. It is the operational expression of replacement theory — the mobilization of the entire federal law enforcement apparatus in service of the demographic project. Every FBI counterintelligence agent reassigned to deportation duty is replacement theory made operational. Every nuclear scientist who vanished while the counterintelligence division was depleted is the cost of that operation.

The Confederacy was a project to preserve a racial hierarchy by destroying the Union. The modern Republican Party is a project to preserve a racial hierarchy by capturing the Union. The destination is the same. The method is the adaptation.

⁂

Peter Thiel has placed at least ten former employees, co-workers, and investing partners into the Trump administration, including the Vice President. David Sacks — co-author with Thiel of a book attacking affirmative action — is AI and crypto czar. Elon Musk led DOGE. The Thiel network is not adjacent to this administration. It is constitutive of it.

Thiel bought New Zealand citizenship through a special ministerial concession — apocalypse insurance. He has described Greta Thunberg as a “legionnaire of the Antichrist.” He funded the Seasteading Institute — autonomous floating societies beyond the jurisdiction of any nation-state. He has backed every political project aimed at dismantling the democratic institutions that might constrain the accumulation of capital.

The exit ideology and the Trump alignment are not contradictory. They are complementary. Silicon Valley funds the political projects that accelerate institutional collapse while simultaneously building the private infrastructure to survive that collapse. The network state is the bunker. The Trump administration is the accelerant.

⁂

The thread that connects all of this is not complicated.

The Republican Party re-erects Confederate monuments and honors Confederate traitors in the name of history. The same party guts the counterintelligence apparatus that protects against foreign adversaries, reassigning agents to enforce the demographic project instead. During the exact months the counterintelligence division was most depleted, ten Americans with access to nuclear weapons secrets died or vanished. The party’s intellectual architecture is built on the same demographic anxiety that animated secession. Silicon Valley funds the project while planning its own exit.

The Confederate monuments are not about history. They are about the present. They are markers. They are claims about who is in charge, whose heroes are honored, and whose memory is protected.

They went back up in October 2025.

The counterintelligence agents went to immigration enforcement in the same months.

The scientists vanished from New Mexico.

The arrangement is on display. It has been on display. The only question that remains is whether enough people will look directly at it before the door closes.

Go Deeper into the Circus

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